My husband and I went to New York over the weekend, just for fun. We stayed at the SoHo 54 and walked miles for 3 days straight. I’ve had a hankering lately to get back into black and white photography, so I carried my real camera with me in a shoulderbag I bought for our summer trip to Europe. I don’t always want to carry a backpack everywhere.

City photography is hard. There’s so much going on, all the time, everywhere. Cars to dodge, signs and streetlights and wires obscuring some part of what you want to photograph, being at street level, which throws off all the lines and perspective if you’re shooting upward. So I mostly stuck to other subjects.

We made it to the Village Vanguard on this trip. We saw the Tyshawn Sorey Trio, who played without stopping, weaving one song into another, for over an hour. We, and all of the audience, were rapt. Witnessing creation, how the musicians interacted with one another, and listening as the music emerged felt like being inside an artist’s mind.