firehouse, Ladder Company 3, 108 E. 13th St, Manhattan, NY, USA

Ladder Company 3, 108 E. 13th St, NYC, USA ©Adam S. Welz 2012

They say the best camera is the one you have with you, and the cam in the iPhone 4S is pretty impressive for the dinky little thing that it is. It also automatically GPS tags every image you shoot. I’m using it to commit the 8th Deadly Sin of Americana.

(Ladder Company 3 lost more men as a percentage of its total complement than any other firehouse in NYC on September 11th. It’s next door to the camera repair place I use.)

Manhattan NY, winter 2010

Manhattan, New York, USA, 20 Feb 2010 ©Adam Welz

another one from the archives

Red-tailed Hawk youngsters, Riverside Park, NYC, 18 June 2009

Hi All

went down to the Riverside nest (in Manhattan’s Upper West Side) this afternoon to check out the three youngsters, one of which has properly fledged, one of which still seems to be in the advanced branching stage, and the third which is still in the nest. As I arrived an adult swooped in with a squirrel, which was a pretty spectacular thing to see. I was very keen to lay my eyes on some NYC Red-tails after spending 6 weeks in this amazing city last year with them while shooting a programme for SABC’s Healing Power of Nature series.

The light was shocking so the images are not great (800 ISO and hail-Mary shutter speeds with no depth of field) but here is the nest-bound youngster and the advanced ‘short-flight’ brancher (note crops bulging with squirrel meat).

Curious little buggers, young Buteo jamaicensis — they’re constantly looking around. If the one on the nest did not fledge just after I left I’m sure it’ll go in the next couple of days. It was standing around a lot on the edge of the nest and eyeballing the ground met ernstige mening.

You can read more about the Riverside Red-tails at Bruce Yolton’s blog

http://urbanhawks.blogs.com/urban_hawks/

Cheers

Adam