Ok so after the wedding, my brother stayed with us for a while, I had hockey to attend to for my honeymoon week and the second week I dedicated to my 10 year old brother, Ryan. He stays in Ohio with my mom so I don’t get to see him as often as I would like to. So I planned a few outings for us to go on while he was here and one of them was New York City. Where could I take a 10 y/o besides Toys-r-us or Nintendo World? Hey Lets go to the Empire State building. I thought that would be cool because I have never been there and I also wanted to see what New York was like from the top. I kinda got the idea from Joe McNally’s Book “The Moment it Clicks”
( Great book by the way. Very inspirational A must have by any photographer)

Ok so now we have our first destination. We hopped on the local Riverline and rode that train to Trenton,NJ where we proceded to the next train which dropped us off at Penn Station in NYC.

After a 2+ hour ride on NJ Transit, we stopped at KFC for lunch and off to The Empire State building.

Being a Wednesday I didn’t think I would be waiting in a roller coaster, 1 1/2 hour long line to go see the top of a skyscraper. That would have killed half our day. Then as if on cue I hear ” Express Passes, get your express pass. No line, No wait !!!”

He said what??? I’ll take 2 of those, Thank you.

Highly recommended. At $45 a piece, I would do it again. The fact that we were personally escorted to our own personal elevator to go to the 80th floor passing by hundreds of people waiting for the “non-express” elevator was worth the price. Once we get off at the 80th floor, there is another elevator that takes us up to the 86th where the observation deck is. Yummy, no wait there either. It was like flash the passes and you were VIP. No wait.



Fastest yet smoothest elevator I’ve ever been on. CrAzY, Am I really goin up 80 floors!!!

A lot of people out there, holding up the line for the “non-express” people downstairs.

Great views from the top

On the back of our ticket it said to advance past GO, collect $200.00 and Stop by B&H Photo for your free gift. Woooo Hoooooo!!!! Free Gift from B&H!!!! That has to be worth something, they dont carry anyhting but the best of the best. Off to B&H.

Spent some time in there loving the new setup. They dedicated 90% of upstairs to photography. It was 10x better than when it was crammed into the corner downstairs. This is what the line looks like as your waiting to be helped by their camera experts.
*Tip* Dont step foot in the B&H store unless you are ready to spend money!!! Just being able to touch and try out everything that you see in the catalog won’t let you walk out of there empty handed. I left with a new Nikon lens cap for my 17-35mm 2.8, a Sandisk CF card reader, and A Lowepro SlingShot 300 AW Camera Bag (which is the only “sling” style bag that will fit a D3 with a 70-200mm attached)

So we left B&H with lighter pockets, ignoring the fact that the free gift was a mini camcorder bag or a disposable camera….WTF that’s the best they can do??? Oh well I picked up some things that I needed, so I was happy. Off to Viacom.

I have a good friend E.S. that works at MTV so I arranged a tour of the Viacom building so my lil bro can see some of the things that go on behind the scenes at a network.

View of Times Square from the cafeteria’s eat-out balcony.

Nickelodeon Floor with Full size Spongebob made of lego blocks.

Hung out some more at Viacom then went back to the streets to see some more sights.

All shots were taken with my Nikon D3 with the 17-35mm 2.8 attached.
More pics of our day can be found here on my Flickr.

Big thanks to Drew for directions, helping me map out my day. Block by Block. Who needs a TOMTOM, I had DREWDREW.
HUGE Thank You for E.S taking us thru the Viacom building and corrupting the Ohio kid with “Get Silly” LOL