Dear New York,
What beautiful photos you are taking - they are really showing off a lot of the grandeur and sheer scale of New York. I went the other way with both of my photos this week and really scaled in. My first instinct, like yours for the Summer in the City challenge, was to take some sweeping park life photos, so I headed to Hyde Park after work looking for some "proper English" park scenes.
Cue big fancy buildings (i.e. Buckingham Palace), pathways lined with oak trees, and swans literally everywhere.
Yet despite all of this beautiful scenery, I was having a bit of a hard time getting the shot I was looking for. The swans were not being their most photogenic selves. The light wasn’t quite right for the big landscape shots, and I was getting a bit frustrated.
Then, out of what seemed a bit like a dream, I saw something up close which I had always heard about in London, but never really managed to confirm to myself.
While our London parks have a plethora of the traditional English ornithological wildlife- the aforementioned Swans, a multitude of Geese, Pigeons (of course) and everything else, there is one surprising addition to this - one that is surprisingly exotic. The Ring Tailed Parakeet.
I snapped the above photo, and thought that even though it doesn’t necessarily shout Summer in the City, it does epitomize summer in London - something beautiful, a bit unexpected, and always proudly multi-cultural.
My second photo for Fountains again went very close in. I noticed that many of the fountains around London, have a lot of ornate, quite beautiful statuary, that I think probably gets quietly overlooked. It is nice to see pretty displays of water and splashes and lovely trickling noises when in the park, but look a bit closer and you can see some probably quite old, quite stunning pieces of art.
So for next week's theme I am going to go broad again and leave it very much up to you how you interpret this: Tourism.
Happy Snapping!
London