It snowed today, the earliest New York has received at least an inch of snow in recorded weather history. I’d write more but honestly, not much else really need be said. Besides, after a night out (like a little bit of snow is gonna stop anyone) I’m in dire need of some thawing out.

I had another shoot just last night, this time with a coworker and friend who wanted some good photos of herself. We had planned on hopping over to a park and getting some nice fun little shots in the sun. The weather, however, had other ideas, for which I’m eternally grateful.

You’d likely get a variety of answers if you were to ask different photographers to name the most important trait a photographer should have, but I think we’d all agree that confidence is pretty high up there.

Like most people who grew up outside of the States, I grew up with a very specific view of the country that lead the world, which I developed through exposure to its greatest export, popular culture. The only difference was that my view was time-shifted by a few decades. And while I recognized that America was made up of fifty states that were home to millions of people living in thousands of cities, it only ever came down to one of them: New York.

The longer you shoot, the more you get used to things like this, these “happy accidents.” Photos where the thing that makes it work the most (or at least one of them) was completely unplanned. It happens more often than one would think. For all the control you try to exert on your shoot, making sure that everything — the gear, the location, the talent, the lighting, the timing, everything — is exactly as it needs to be, randomness always manages to creep in.

I just love that the bridge is called Hell Gate Bridge. It brings to mind images of demons and hellspawn erupting from some portal to the netherworld. Trains go in through one side of the portal, and a massive snakelike demon emerges from the other, wreaking havoc and laying waste to the countryside.

The minute a New Yorker gets on a train, all bets are off. What might pass for a civilized society above ground turns into a free-for-all under its streets. Stock brokers, school teachers, pastors, deacons, and all manner of person shed off their friendly personae when they enter the tunnels of the New York transit system. They are no longer men, they are morlocks in a Wellsian nightmare.

My first update in over two weeks. The shame is so great, if this were feudal Japan I’d be forced to disembowel myself to regain honor. Luckily it’s not, and I get to keep my guts where they are.

I’ve seen a lot of Christmas decorations in my time, but this has got to be one of the more macabre ones to date. It reminds me of those witch doctors’ shrunken heads you’d see in cartoons and comics. The only things that are missing are lifeless eyes and sewn-shut lips.

Carriage horses always make me sad. Whenever I think about horses, I think wide open spaces. I think herds of wild horses, thundering across the plains. I don’t think of bridles and saddles and pulling carriages of fat tourists through a paved park.