Jack Frost isn’t done having his fun with the Northeast, it seems, and has decided to give it to New York for a little longer. Naturally, this meant I was compelled to run outside with my camera

and shoot the same damn things, all over again. Three snowfalls, three sets of photos from the same park. And I already used up my Waxing Philosophical card on the last one, so that’s out.

Chuck and Julie are two of my favorite people around. I have friends I’ve known longer or friends I know on deeper levels, but when it comes to just simple, unadulterated (keyword unadult) fun, Chuck and Julie are a tough act to follow.

In my last entry, one of the photos I posted was of the benches along the East River. I loved the shot, but one thing bugged me—the wire fencing to the right of the image. It broke the whole “pattern of repeating elements” aspect to the photo. If I had just moved up two benches, I’d have had no distractions from the seemingly-infinite line of benches and railing. Problem was, I didn’t notice it until long after I’d processed and uploaded the photo; there was nothing I could do about it. I determined to go out and re-shoot the scene after the next decent snowfall. To get it right.

I think perhaps New Yorkers’ unflappability might be born in part of their disdain for tourists. Out-of-towners gawk. New Yorkers, worldly wise and having seen it all, simply go about their business. And while there might be some merit to not gaping wide-eyed at every little thing you see, if you spend all your time walking around in a cloud of disaffectation you’re gonna miss out on a lot of the fun stuff.

My first real memory of Stefanie is of acting beside her in a Federico Garcia Lorca play, The Butterfly’s Evil Spell. She played the butterfly. I was the beetle that was hopelessly in love with her.

Yesterday was the 4th of July, my first since moving to New York. Naturally, we decided to do it up right—by going to Jersey.

Sometimes I think I’ll never be a “real New Yorker” because I actually kinda like Times Square. It seems that more often than not, simply mentioning the words “Times Square” to a New Yorker will elicit responses of “Dear god, why?” (a coworker actually said that to me once) and a disdain normally reserved for Hoboken, L.A., and the Red Sox.

Shot an engagement party for a lovely couple on Friday night. It was held on the rooftop of a building in the Lower Midtown/Koreatown area. The shot above is the view from the south side of the rooftop. You can actually see the Brooklyn Bridge, a good three miles away. I can’t begin to imagine what it’d be like to have that view waiting for you every morning.

Updates have been few and far between lately on account of me still wrestling with my library of over 36,000 photos. I’m hoping to use “this photography thing” to help supplement my main income, or at the very least bring in enough money to pay for itself. God knows photography is no cheap endeavor, and it’d be nice if it pulled its own weight once in a while.

Just before the weekend, Scott Kelby—photo guru, Photoshop whiz extraordinaire, and all-around swell fella—posed a photo challenge: spend the weekend shooting like it was 1999. In a nutshell, go out and shoot with your digital camera like it was a film camera: no reviewing shots on the LCD, no more than 24 or 36 shots for the whole weekend, no looking at any of the shots until the day after you “finish the roll.”