Fear And Adventure

Artwork: #27 of 72 by Joshua Ball

Tags: nyc photographs, new yrok city photographs, brooklyn bridge photographs, winter photographs, snow photographs, nyc canvas prints, new yrok city canvas prints, brooklyn bridge canvas prints, winter canvas prints, snow canvas prints

Title:

Fear And Adventure

Artist:

Joshua Ball

Medium:

Photograph

Description:

I recently attended a seminar in New Brunswick, NJ, which is about an hour outside of New York city. After the seminar, I took a train into the city and made my way to Brooklyn to stay with a friend. The stay was to last four nights, which gave me three full days to visit. I woke up on the first day and walked into their living room to look out of the window, which normally gave a clear panoramic of the NYC skyline. To my dismay, all I saw was an intense snow storm. I could barely see across the busy Brooklyn street, let alone the famous skyline. After checking the weather forecast, I was further disheartened. In the next 24 hours, roughly 12 inches of wet, heavy snow fell on the city.

My first day was a complete wash as it became extremely difficult to navigate the streets, especially for an out-of-towner. The next day I woke up and walked back to that window hoping to see clear skies. My heart dropped as I saw the same scene, except this time there was even more snow on the ground. The friend I was staying with was leaving to go to work and I didn�t want to stay another day in a Brooklyn apartment staring out of the window. With the excitement of the trip rapidly fading, I decided that I wouldn�t let the weather keep me from my planned adventure. I put on a pair of socks, taped plastic bags to my feet, put on another pair of socks, laced up my boots, filled my pockets with camera equipment and headed out on the Brooklyn streets. I rode the subway with my friend to his work, and then parted ways. I spent the next 12 hours fumbling around the subway system and doing my best to visit some of the more notable sites.

I managed to make it back to the Brooklyn apartment after stomping through the snow for over 12 hours. The next day, I went back out into the city alone with one purpose, to make it to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge. I had visited NYC before and one of the things I never got to see was this bridge. As I have developed a love for photographing bridges, I was bound to capture it in my own style. It was cold and wet but I spent almost two hours on the bridge, taking hundreds of photographs. I have several more shots that will be going up on the site in the next few weeks, and I�m not sure if this is my favorite, but this is among one of the last images I captured of New York city. I love how the suspension cables all group towards the center of the bridge to form a symmetrical image.

All the photographs from the trip remind me of the sense of adventure that I felt as I explored one of the world�s largest cities alone. I�m sure I looked like a typical tourist with a camera around my neck and a tripod slung on my back. I�d be lying if I said I wasn�t a little afraid to traverse the city alone in such adverse conditions. In fact, I was pretty terrified, but I refused to let that keep me from shooting the big apple. I was born and raised in Toledo, OH, a city of less than 300,000 people. That said, I was a little out of my element; but my fear mixed with that sense of adventure drove me to explore even further. Fear has a way of crippling people into complacency, but that same fear has the power of forcing people to push their own limits. If we don�t push ourselves through even the most alien conditions, we can never truly know what we are capable of. I think I captured some pretty unique images throughout my trip, but I did so at the sake of my own comfort level and I�m extremely glad that I did. I�m actually looking forward to returning to NYC and many other metropolitan cities to continue my photographic search for a style that is uniquely my own. I learned a little about myself in those three days and I picked up a thing or two about the subway system too!

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