Look at this, I'm doing it again: compiling a selection of my favorite images from the past month. September was much like August, in that I shot some street, and I shot some birds, but I also got to travel to Gothenburg (or Göteburg, if you're Swedish; and if you're not Sweedish, I bet $100 you'll never predict how to correctly pronounce "Göteburg" in Swedish). Enough preamble, here's the pictures.
Couch Surfin’
Look at that chest hair stubble! And it even kept my chain!
Okay, let’s start with the very goofy image I used as the hero image for this post. That was my submission for week 37 of 52frames.com’s photo challenge (which I’ve been taking part in since the early days of the pandemic). The theme was “Out of Place”. There’s a surfboard in my office in DUMBO, which is clearly nowhere near to any waves, so I thought I’d incorporate it into my entry. For fun, I also decided to pop it into the beta of Photoshop, which now integrates Google’s ridiculously-named “Nano Banana” image generation model. I told it to “remove the shirt and add reflective sunglasses”, and this was the result:
Look, I know a lot of people hate AI, and I get it, but this thing gave me two things I don’t have: abs, and a hairy chest, so I have to give it at least some props. Kidding aside, I’m pretty impressed with how seamlessly it fulfilled my request. Then I decided to push it further, and told it to add some waves, and again, the result was kind of crazy impressive.
Gothenburg
I traveled to Sweden for a work event thrown by Precis, the company I work for. The port of Gothenburg is the 2nd largest city in Sweden, and the relationship between Stockholmers and Gothenburgers was described to me like the New York City/Boston dynamic: the big cool city thinks of the smaller city dwellers as a bunch of rubes. Or something like that. But Gothenburg felt very intimate, and I had a fun time walking around the quaint but touristy Haga Nygata area with one of my coworkers on one of our free days. Also, as you can see, I’m never one to let a window seat on an airplane go to waste; I cannot suppress the compulsion take photos out the window, even if it is covered in tiny scratches.
Around NYC
As usual, I shot a lot of NYC images. One fine Saturday afternoon, I took my big-ass super telephoto lens and took a walk from Chinatown to DUMBO via the Manhattan Bridge, and sort of did some telephoto street photography, which is a fun exercise, as it is impossible to remain inconspicuous while pointing a massive lens around.
The Birds
Some of my favorite birds that I photographed last month include grey catbirds (they’re so common, and really quite plain, but somehow they manage to be so damn photogenic). I also got some raptors, specifically ospreys and hawks. Finally, I got a nice portrait of the male mute swan that lives near the Lullwater in Prospect Park. His name is Biggie.