Category: Candid

Resting for a Minute

35th St and Eleventh Avenue, New York

Continuing on my walk down to the Javits Center, I kept taking pictures of people in the street, so now we’ve moved beyond an occasional ethical lapse into full-blown hypocrisy. But I liked the symmetry of the two men with their heavy bags, baseball caps, hands on hips, and smiles, with the shadows and trees splitting the image down the middle. Irresistible.

The Intervention

44th St and Eleventh Avenue, New York

Contravening the street photography ethics previously mentioned, I took a few shots of this group as I passed, drawn by some of the dramatic gesturing. I heard the man on the left saying he wouldn’t continue the conversation with the participation of the man on the right and the woman’s rejoinder was that he would remain part of the conversation since he also cared about the baseball-cap man. Of course, I have no idea what they were really discussing but it was impassioned.

Birdman

Back from my travels. Over the next week or so, I’ll be posting snapshots from my travels in New York and Chicago. This was a trip to catch up with friends and family and take care of NY personal business. So it was extremely fulfilling in those areas, not so productive on the photography front.

57th St and Broadway, New York

My current ethics of photography do not really include taking shots of people in the street without their consent and/or collaboration. In this case, I crouched down in front of him so he knew I was there and tourists were clearly photographing him with their phones from bad vantage points, and he was not complaining so I took it he was tacitly consenting. I will probably post a few other street shots over the coming days from this trip that contravene this personal rule of mine, where, for one reason or another, I felt taking the shot was validated in some way – we shall see…

Construction

Brightwells Yard, Farnham

I shot this looking out the window because I liked the geometry of it. The men were about to dig up a lot of the brick so they could lay some conduit along the base of the building, then cover it all up again. I thought of it as a black and white image at the time because of the strong shadows and the triangle formed by the two men and the circle of conduit in the lower left.