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September 11th.

Anyway, there’s a certain calmness over the city. There’s a feeling of remembrance.

Anyway, photographing today, same old thing but I have to go back to last night. There are many parties in the city, maybe three of them a week for the last 10 years. Every type of culture, every type of event but last night was the first. There’s a group of Indians called Singh. They’re the ones with the turbans, very nice people.

A gentleman I work for – very wealthy gentleman – threw a party in Long Island and is called Roswell. There’s a whole Indian community there and every week one of the very wealthy Singh people throw a big party. And I photographed one last night.

These people can drink more than any religious group I’ve ever seen in my life. They can beat out some of the Irish groups, it was shocking. The food was amazing – lamb chops, shrimp all night, and open bar set up everywhere. It was very interesting.

I like some Indian music but not that much. They were doing Indian oldies. I was hysterical. They were dancing in old Indian style versus the new Indian style like we had our dances in the 50’s, we have our dances now. The photography was incredible.

I ended up staying at one of my new bosses’ houses in Long Island – some mansion, a Singh house. It was like a temple inside. It was like the Taj Mahal. It was like I was in another country.

I ended up putting groups together of people and then more groups came in and I was just screaming, “More, more!” I would have 50 in a group shots, 60’s, over 200 people there. I was a great asset to the party. The gentleman gave me a hug and a kiss – his wife – because I was with my funny jokes. One funny joke was they had lamb chops all over the place and I was saying, “These are amazing pork chops,” and everybody got real quiet but then they started laughing because of course, they don’t eat pork.

Yesterday’s photography was very interesting but I’m going to have to get back to that. I’m exhausted, I haven’t slept in over 24 hours. I want to go home, see the kids tonight, try to get some sleep.

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Adding on to the blog before this one. I wanted to say that what I think last night, these Singh turban people – the party I did – are very nice people and I realized that the Singh turban people shouldn’t be confused with these other turbans that are I guess they’re terrorizing the world or whatever they’re doing. I don’t know much about it but as far as I can see, these Singh are good, hardworking people and very nice.

Anyway, getting back to yesterday’s photography on 32nd and 6th Avenue. It’s Fashion Week here in New York City so there’s a lot of interesting outfits going to parties at night in here and there which I should’ve went last night but I went to the Singh party.

Anyway, the people with outfits are all over the place and I stood most of the day stopping people, explaining to them that, “Hi, I’m from Portraits of New York. We’re covering 6th Avenue this week and we’d like to get a shot of you.” Maybe I stopped 40 people and maybe 30 people stopped and posed.

These are great outfits, these are cool looking people and there are probably about 40 cards I gave out. I believe as long as I keep up giving out cards everyday to 30 people, 10 new people a day will go on the site, maybe 20. But I always push it to how they should go to the site and see it, it’s quite a visual experience. And I think they’re doing it.

Anyway, signing off.