2022 – Mayday! Mayday! More vehicular weirdness!
(Ignore April 30, 2017 publish date – this was published on May 23, 2022)
This picture has nothing to do with Mayday or vehicular weirdness, but you KNOW I have a reason for including it that will pop up later.
So what’s this “MAYDAY!” noise all about? Nothing special…………….I went out on May 1 to try a new angle on this vehicle length/iPhone/PANO obsession of mine (good news to anyone who’s sick of this: the end is in sight…………………maybe).
Instead of mostly straight-line, flat ground, I decided to try shooting vehicles coming off a highway onto a curving, half-circle, upward ramp. For all you locals, the spot I chose was the Hackensack Avenue north exit off eastbound Route 4 (across from Riverside Square).
Ignore most of that because this first pic shows a car going onto the highway from Hackensack Ave (from this point on, click all pix to enlarge):
These 3 show a van-type truck, a red car and a pickup truck:
I wasn’t expecting an obstacle course, but EVERYTHING (trees, signs, sloping ground) is an obstacle when you’re trying to smoothly cover half a circular motion without tripping, tipping or falling.
To add to the fun, the driver sees me the entire time I’m aiming my phone at him/her and is wondering what the hell I’m doing. Beginning to feel self-conscious, I’m mentally yelling at them to keep their eyes on the curving road.
But there’s no time to feel uncomfortable as a motorcycle rumbles off the highway into view:
I decided to cross the ramp and get them from the other side:
That got old fast…………….plus, I’m now closer and totally in the way of them viewing oncoming traffic that they have to merge with.
Back to the previous spot to shoot a nice long yellow vehicle:
I decided to get closer to the highway and further from the vehicles:
While I was in that spot, I saw a school bus in the distance coming toward me on the westbound side. I didn’t expect that on a Sunday, but the side of the bus explained why I shouldn’t think that way:
But the best thing about this pic was that I had to quickly switch the pan-direction arrow on the phone from left-to-right to right-to-left to accommodate the bus. Of course, doing that made me hope there wouldn’t be any eastbound traffic because the cars would all get scrunched.
Fortunately, there was only one such car and look how it came out! Not only was it shrunk, but no wheels/tires showed up!
It’s a perfect hovermobile!
OK – it’s explain-the-t-shirt time………..
During my shoot, a VERY unexpected vehicle turned off Rt 4E onto the Hackensack Ave north ramp – something I hadn’t seen in over a decade, but knew right away what it was (and managed to get TWO long shots of it):
It’s a 1938 Ahrens-Fox fire truck that belongs to the Maywood, NJ, Fire Department. How do I know that?
It was part of the Hackensack Columbus Day Parade in 2011 and I took a couple of shots of it in the parade’s staging area two blocks from home (Maywood is immediately west of Hackensack):
That MayDay sighting of an 84-year-old fire truck Mayd the shoot worthwhile.
And to my siblings: Happy 5/23!
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