Pillowfight

I was late leaving home, so by the time I reached Wall St, the NYPD had intervened to close down the pillowfight. The air was still full of flying feathers, and thick drifts had accumulated all across the intersection of Wall and Broad. Small groups of displaced pillowfighters, pillows tucked under their arms, wandered around lower Manhattan, looking rather lost and forlorn.

By the time-honored trick of eavesdropping on the cops, I learned that a smaller pillowfight had broken out in City Hall Park, so I hurried up there in the hope of getting a few action shots. Fortunately, there were still perhaps a hundred high school kids cheerfully slugging it out there.

For the record, photographing pillowfights presents a novel challenge. It's like sports photography, in that everything moves fast and motion blur is everywhere, but a massed pillow fight is even more of a melée than most team sports, and your composition is apt to be constantly disrupted by large, fast-moving white objects. By the time that the police finally showed up to put an end to the fun (having either tactfully taken their time walking up from Wall St or stopped in a donut shop along the way) I had a great many pictures featuring pillows, but not too many that were actually usable.