alan little’s weblog

a picture a week (3)

28th February 2006 permanent link

Cityscape: Midtown Manhattan, looking north from the Empire State Building, July 2000.

I was in NY to attend a yoga workshop with Pattabhi Jois. Given his sometimes-somewhat fearsome reputation, I wanted to check him out before taking the plunge and going on a big trip to Mysore. His teaching tour in 2000 included New York, so it also seemed like a good chance to get acquainted with that wonderful, wonderful city.

The yoga classes were great. I was single at the time and didn’t know anybody in NY, so outside of class was a bit lonely at times until my friend Jeffrey showed up for the second week – but at least I had plenty of time for wandering about with a camera without having to worry about what anybody else would think. At the time I was only just starting to get to grips with digital imaging, struggling to learn how to scan film, how to drive Photoshop etc. I put some of my yoga class photos online (they were one of the first things on alanlittle.org) but it was an awful lot of work, and I never got round to doing anything with any of the non-yoga photos from the trip even though I was pretty pleased with some of them. Now I have a family, a more demanding job and much less free time than I had five years ago, but my photo-processing technique is also a lot slicker than it was (and I’m running Photoshop on a much faster computer). And it’s important to still make an effort to keep in touch with the creative process.

related entries: Photography

all text and images © 2003–2008