First up, I put together my Photsynth of Times Square. If you’ve got a PC and don’t mind installing a browser plug-in, check it out. It looks like the image below, only you can click and drag to view a 360 degree panorama generated from 30 separate images.

See it here!

Anyway, to get into the city without obscene parking charges for our trucks, not to mention the hassle of driving/unloading/reloading our trucks in New York, we rented a cargo van and packed our gear for the weekend into it. We were able to do this because we have a very, very tiny space and no finish line presence at this event.

The back of the cargo van, loaded with random stuff and people riding illegal-immigrant style.

New York Style pizza. So far, I’ve tried chicken tomato, pepperoni mushroom, ravioli, buffalo chicken, and margarita pizza slices.

It’s ironic that in such a massive city, everything is so tiny and cramped. Here is our hotel room, taken standing in the shower. There’s hardly room to unpack bags, and it costs $340 a night per room.

And our 10′x10′ expo setup. Nearly as large as the hotel room. Half-way through the day, the radio station booth next to us packed up and headed out for the day, so we removed the railing seperating the booths to allow for better flow through the booth. It’s still very cramped.

And FINALLY! I have my camera. It’s great. Image stabilizing lens, wide angle and macro lenses, three filters, a bag, and lots of other odds and ends.

I had to let the battery charge a while, so I only made it out to test the camera out around dusk. I spent a while using a colorful storefront to test out various image settings, shutter speeds, aperture, ISO, etc. to see what the camera can do. I was really impressed, and as I got a little more used to using it, I found myself for the most part using manual settings rather than auto modes to get the results I wanted. I took 180 pictures in about an hour, and many were various shots of the Empire State Building (also to test out settings for the most part).

Here’s a good example of image quality (click to enlarge on all these for full appreciation – still much smaller than actual image size)

Monochrome!

And a different angle in the dark on the way back to the hotel.

And in following with the pizza theme…