Neither more nor less

On 12 July , 2007 from 11:12 PM to 11:36 PM we photographed these rats at the complex of rat-holes near the St. Marks Place and avenue A entrance . This complex of rat-holes has been in use for many months , likely for more than a year . If anyone had made any effort at all to find rats in Tompkins Square Park they certainly would have found these holes with the rats that use them a long time ago .

This complex was filled-in with dry earth on 21 July , 2007 with the rats re-opening one rat-hole at this location by the next afternoon .

We were not able to successfully photograph most of the rats at this location on this evening simply because it is very difficult to focus and follow a fast moving rat in near darkness . The pictured brightness of the above scenes is misleading and is an artifact of the digital photgraphic process . In reality the rats were barely visible .

In this 24 minute period we took 54 pictures of rats . There were many more rats seen than photographed . At times rats were seen side-by-side at a particular rat-hole with one rat entering the hole while the other rat was exiting the same hole . Often during this 24 minute period one could see as many as 3 or 4 very energetic rats running in different directions .

There was no electronic flash used to make these photographs : they are all by available light using a very fast 50 mm Noctilux lens with the aperature wide-open at f 1 and exposure times of .25 to .3 second , with the camera , a Leica M8 , being hand-held while shooting .