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This was taken on Canal Street, a couple blocks east of Varick. I noticed it when I was walking back to the Canal Street subway station ...
I have no idea what it means ... but it seems like an interesting "wish" for the 8 million residents of New York City...
***************
This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...
This was taken on Broadway between 117th and 118th Streets, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
***************
This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...
I stumbled upon this scene at 44th Street and First Avenue, when I was looking for a nice view of the United Nations Building. I guess I wasn't the only one ...
It looks like the two people in the background were getting set up for some kind of news broadcast ... but I don't know what was going on with the guy in the foreground. Maybe he was carrying on a Skype/FaceTime video conversation -- but it sure did look like he was singing to his iPhone. Whether he was associated with the other two people, I never did figure out ...
If I had been willing to hang around for an hour or so, I probably could have spoken to them and found out what was happening. But I didn't have the patience. I took the shot and moved on ...
***************
This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...
"Petit espace vide entre les parties d'un tout"
les tissus urbains et ruraux se maillent, raccordent, rapiècent resserrent leur trames...
Ces espaces m'intéressent car ils sont synonyme de liberté, créent un flou paradoxalement engendré par une partie finie, un ensemble fermé.
"Small space between the parts of a whole"
urban and rural network over fabrics, connect, tightening their frames ...
These areas interest me because they are means freedom, paradoxically create a blur generated by a finite subset, a closed set.
(more details later, as time permits)
************************
A year ago, I uploaded a bunch of photos to Flickr and admitted that while I had lived in New York City for 45 years — I had never previously attended, observed, photographed, or participated in the annual Halloween Parade that takes place in Greenwich Village. I won’t repeat the rest of the meandering blather that I wrote … if you would like to see it, and/or the photos that accompanied the notes, you can find them here on Flickr:
www.flickr.com/photos/yourdon/albums/72157646748393453
In any case, though, I decided to return to the parade again this year … and, like last year, I got off the subway at the Canal Street (express) station, and walked north to where the cops and the parade-floats, the bands and the professional photographers were gathering in anticipation of another year of festivity.
But I quickly discovered that, while last year’s parade started at 7 PM, when it was already cold and dark, this year’s parade was not scheduled to get started until 9 PM. I realize that 9 PM is quite an early hour for ghouls and vampires, not to mention teenagers, young adults, party-goers, and even the majority of the bridge-and-tunnel crowd who were presumably just getting in their trains and buses to make the trek from the wilderness regions of Long Island and New Jersey. But for those of us slightly (ahem) older than the age of 35, 9 PM is about the time when we turn on last night’s video-recording of Jimmy Fallon or Trevor Noah, and watch in a glassy-eyed stupor for a few minutes before we begin snoring …
So … I decided not to hang around the official starting position at Spring Street for two or three hours, and instead began wandering further north into the more crowded sections of the West Village — near West 4th Street. And I’m glad I did: while there were no bands or “fancy” displays, there was a lot more energy, and a lot of interesting costumes and people (or ghouls and vampires, depending on your preferences).
The only outcasts, far more confused and lost than the out-of-town tourists, were the cops. There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands; and this was two weeks before the recent terrorist attacks, with nobody expecting any trouble more serious than an occasional happy drunkard falling over in the street. Most of the cops that I saw were somehow affiliated with a “Community Affairs” department (or division, or whatever); but what made it funny is that none of them seemed to have a clue where they were. At one point, I stood near a friendly, attentive police officer at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 8th Street — when a tourist (sounding like he was from Germany) wandered up and asked the cop for directions to 9th Street. The cop shrugged politely and said that he really didn’t know — despite the fact that the street sign for 9th Street was clearly visible, less than a block away. I got the impression that the cops had been brought in from such far-away areas as Staten Island, Queens, and the Bronx; and while they could have navigated the neatly-rectangularized streets of mid-town Manhattan, they were utterly lost in Greenwich Village.
Oh, well, it didn’t matter. I watched one woman emerge from the subway, reassuring her clearly-terrified friend, “Don’t worry, I’ll get you back to New Jersey safely. I promise!” But she took one look at the wildly-costumed crowd around her, near the Waverly Theater, let out a loud “Woo hoo!” squeal, and left her friend behind….
In the midst of all this, I did manage to get some photos … and I’ve uploaded a small subset of them here to Flickr. Enjoy …
This was taken on Canal Street, a couple blocks east of Varick. I noticed it when I was walking back to the Canal Street subway station ...
I have no idea what it means ... but it seems like an interesting "wish" for the 8 million residents of New York City...
***************
This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...
The Rogues Gallery, or just Rogues for short, are a subset of Flash-villains who formed an informal union and alliance consisting of Lady Flash, Godspeed, Razer, Chroma, & Murmur
Back Row: The Fiddler & Kid Zoom
"Petit espace vide entre les parties d'un tout"
les tissus urbains et ruraux se maillent, raccordent, rapiècent resserrent leur trames...
Ces espaces m'intéressent car ils sont synonyme de liberté, créent un flou paradoxalement engendré par une partie finie, un ensemble fermé.
"Small space between the parts of a whole"
urban and rural network over fabrics, connect, tightening their frames ...
These areas interest me because they are means freedom, paradoxically create a blur generated by a finite subset, a closed set.
This was taken on Thompson Street, just north of Canal.
I assume there is no doubt in anyone's mind that this is a couple ... at least for the moment. Let's hope it continues ...
***************
This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...
This was taken on W. Broadway, between Wooster and Prince
***************
This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...
Halloween continues on the subway platforms of New York City. This fellow did not look like he was on the prowl for candy; but he was clearly dressed in a holiday costume, while surfing the web on his cell phone.
This was taken in the middle of the afternoon, when I was heading downtown ... so the costumes were still pretty mild at this point.
************************
A year ago, I uploaded a bunch of photos to Flickr and admitted that while I had lived in New York City for 45 years — I had never previously attended, observed, photographed, or participated in the annual Halloween Parade that takes place in Greenwich Village. I won’t repeat the rest of the meandering blather that I wrote … if you would like to see it, and/or the photos that accompanied the notes, you can find them here on Flickr:
www.flickr.com/photos/yourdon/albums/72157646748393453
In any case, though, I decided to return to the parade again this year … and, like last year, I got off the subway at the Canal Street (express) station, and walked north to where the cops and the parade-floats, the bands and the professional photographers were gathering in anticipation of another year of festivity.
But I quickly discovered that, while last year’s parade started at 7 PM, when it was already cold and dark, this year’s parade was not scheduled to get started until 9 PM. I realize that 9 PM is quite an early hour for ghouls and vampires, not to mention teenagers, young adults, party-goers, and even the majority of the bridge-and-tunnel crowd who were presumably just getting in their trains and buses to make the trek from the wilderness regions of Long Island and New Jersey. But for those of us slightly (ahem) older than the age of 35, 9 PM is about the time when we turn on last night’s video-recording of Jimmy Fallon or Trevor Noah, and watch in a glassy-eyed stupor for a few minutes before we begin snoring …
So … I decided not to hang around the official starting position at Spring Street for two or three hours, and instead began wandering further north into the more crowded sections of the West Village — near West 4th Street. And I’m glad I did: while there were no bands or “fancy” displays, there was a lot more energy, and a lot of interesting costumes and people (or ghouls and vampires, depending on your preferences).
The only outcasts, far more confused and lost than the out-of-town tourists, were the cops. There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands; and this was two weeks before the recent terrorist attacks, with nobody expecting any trouble more serious than an occasional happy drunkard falling over in the street. Most of the cops that I saw were somehow affiliated with a “Community Affairs” department (or division, or whatever); but what made it funny is that none of them seemed to have a clue where they were. At one point, I stood near a friendly, attentive police officer at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 8th Street — when a tourist (sounding like he was from Germany) wandered up and asked the cop for directions to 9th Street, the cop shrugged politely and said that he really didn’t know — despite the fact that the street sign for 9th Street was clearly visible, less than a block away. I got the impression that the cops had been brought in from such far-away areas as Staten Island, Queens, and the Bronx; and while they could have navigated the neatly-rectangularized streets of mid-town Manhattan, they were utterly lost in Greenwich Village.
Oh, well, it didn’t matter. I watched one woman emerge from the subway, reassuring her clearly-terrified friend, “Don’t worry, I’ll get you back to New Jersey safely. I promise!” But she took one look at the wildly-costumed crowd around her, near the Waverly Theater, let out a loud “Woo hoo!” squeal, and left her friend behind….
In the midst of all this, I did manage to get some photos … and I’ve uploaded a small subset of them here to Flickr. Enjoy …
The Rogues Gallery, or just Rogues for short, are a subset of Flash-villains who formed an informal union and alliance consisting of the Pied Piper, Heat Wave, Captain Cold, The Mirror Master (Samuel Joseph Scudder), & The Top
Back Row: Abra Kadabra, Weather Wizard, & The Trickster
This was taken on Houston St., between Wooster and Sullivan
***************
This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...
This was taken on the corner of Spring & Mott Street, in the SoHo district of Manhattan.oHo district of Manhattan.
***************
This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...
This was taken near the corner of Prince & Lafayette Streets... down in the SoHo district of Manhattan.
***************
This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...
Dalton Highway, Alaska.
Welcome to a reposting of Kevin Dooley's Pan-American Trek using Google Street View, with a twist. I've chosen a subset of images and have printed them on Impossible Project Color 600 instant film with the Instant Lab Universal photo printer. Hopefully you'll find this treatment of the images interesting! Thanks again to the Google Street View drivers!
Maybe the young woman is not really eating her iPhone ... but it's hard to imagine anything else going on.
As for the guy standing beside her: it looks to me like he is carrying a selfs-stick, with a GoPro camera attached to it.
Beyond that, it's all a mystery to me.
Note: I chose this as my "photo of the da" for Nov 14, 2015.
***************
This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...
The Rogues Gallery, or just Rogues for short, are a subset of Flash-villains who formed an informal union and alliance consisting of the Turtle, Rose and Thorn, Kilg%re, & Savitar
Back Row: Magenta, Blacksmith, & Golden Glider
When I admire the wonders of a sunset or the beauty of the moon, my soul expands in the worship of the creator.
~Mahatma Gandhi
#sun, #sunset, #sunshine, #nature, #twilightscapes, #sky, #cloud, #sunsetporn, #orange, #cloudporn, #color, #sunsetlovers, #isea_sunsets, #scenicsunset, #sunsethunter, #irox_skyline, #edit, #editoftheday, #editfromtheheart, #editjunky, #editfever, #editing, #naturehippys, #skyporn,
Heliconia, derived from the Greek word helikonios, is a genus of about 100 to 200 species of flowering plants which are native to the tropical Americas and Pacific Ocean islands west to Indonesia. Many species of Heliconia are found in rainforests or tropical wet forests of these regions. Common names for the genus include lobster-claws, wild plantains or false bird-of-paradise because of their close similarity to the bird-of-paradise flowers (Strelitzia). Collectively, these plants are also simply called Heliconias.
These plants range from 1 ½ to 15 feet tall depending on species. The simple leaves of these plants range from 6 inches to 10 feet. They are characteristically long, oblong, alternate, or growing opposite one another on non-woody petioles often longer than the leaf, often forming large clumps with age. Their flowers are produced on long, erect or drooping panicles, and consist of brightly colored waxy bracts with small true flowers peeping out. The growth habit of heliconias is similar to Canna, Strelitzia, and bananas, to which they are related. The flowers can be hues of reds, oranges, yellows, and greens. The plants typically flower during the wet season. The bracts protect the flowers; floral shape often limits pollination to a subset of hummingbirds.
Heliconias are grown for florists and as landscape plants in tropical regions all over the world. Heliconias need an abundance of water, sunlight, and soils rich in humus. The flower of H. psittacorum (Parrot Heliconia) is especially distinctive, its greenish-yellow flowers with black spots and red bracts are reminiscent of bright parrot plumage. Most commonly grown landscape Heliconia species include Heliconia augusta, H. bihai, H. brasiliensis, H. caribaea, H. latispatha, H. pendula, H. psittacorum, H. rostrata, H. schiediana, and H. wagneriana.
Heliconias are an important food source for forest hummingbirds, some of which (for example Rufous-breasted Hermit, Glaucis hirsuta) also use the plant for nesting. The Honduran White Bat, Ectophylla alba also lives in tents it makes from Heliconia leaves.
Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Miami FL
I took at least a dozen interesting photos of this mother and her two kids -- and all of them were interesting. But I decided initially not to overwhelm my loyal Flickr followers, and originally chose just this one to upload ...
But I got a bunch of nice comments and reactions from people (see notes below), so I've now uploaded another five photos from the same sequence. They're all a bit different, and I don't know which (if any) may prove to be the favorite of the bunch...
**********************************
This is a continuation of Flickr sets that I created in 2014 (shown here), 2013 (shown here) 2012 (shown here), 2011 (shown here), 2010 (shown here), 2009 (shown here), and 2008 (shown here) -- which, collectively, illustrate a variety of scenes and people in the small "pocket park" known as Verdi Square, located at 72nd Street and Broadway in New York City's Upper West Side, right by the 72nd St. IRT subway station.
I typically visit a local gym once or twice a week, and I get there by taking the downtown IRT express from my home (at 96th Street) down to the 72nd Street stop. Whenever possible, I try to schedule an extra 30-60 minutes to sit quietly on one of the park benches, and just watch the flow of people coming in and out of the park -- sometimes just passing through, to get from 72nd Street up to 73rd Street, sometimes coming down Broadway to enter the park at 73rd Street, but mostly entering or exiting the subway station.
You see all kinds of people here: students, bums, tourists (from New Jersey and from all four corners of the globe), office workers, homeless people, retired people, babysitters, children, soldiers, sanitation workers, lovers, friends, dogs, cats, pigeons, and a few things that simply defy description. Sometimes you see the same people over and over again; sometimes they follow a regular pattern at a particular time of the day, which always makes me smile — even though I never go up to them and introduce myself.
If I focus on the people coming south on Broadway, and entering the park at 73rd Street, and then continuing to walk southwards toward the subway entrance, I typically have five or ten seconds to (a) decide if they're sufficiently interesting to bother photographing,(b) wait for them to get in a position where I can get a clear shot of them, and (c) focus my camera on them and take several shots, in the hope that at least one or two of them will be well-focused and really interesting.
While you might get the impression that I photograph every single person who moves through this park, it's actually just the opposite: the overwhelming majority of people that I see here are just not all that interesting. (It's not that they're ugly, it's just that there's nothing interesting, memorable, or distinctive about them.) Even so, I might well take, say, 200 shots in the space of an hour. But some of them are repetitive or redundant, and others are blurred or out-of-focus, or technically defective in some other way. Of the ones that survive this kind of scrutiny, many turn out to be well-focused, nicely-composed, but ... well ... just "okay". I'll keep them on my computer, just in case, but I don't bother uploading them.
Typically, only about 1-2% of the photos I've taken get uploaded to Flickr -- e.g., about 5-10 photos from a one-hour session in which a thousand, or more, people have walked past me. There are some exceptions to this rule of thumb -- but in general, what you're seeing it is indeed only a tiny, tiny subset of the "real" street scene in New York City. On the other hand, it is reassuring to see that there are at least a few "interesting" people in a city that often has a reputation of being mean, cold, and heartless...
(more comments later, as time permits)
**********************************
This is a continuation of Flickr sets that I created in 2014 (shown here), 2013 (shown here)
2012 (shown here), 2011 (shown here), 2010 (shown here), 2009 (shown here), and 2008 (shown here) -- which, collectively, illustrate a variety of scenes and people in the small "pocket park" known as Verdi Square, located at 72nd Street and Broadway in New York City's Upper West Side, right by the 72nd St. IRT subway station.
I typically visit a local gym once or twice a week, and I get there by taking the downtown IRT express from my home (at 96th Street) down to the 72nd Street stop. Whenever possible, I try to schedule an extra 30-60 minutes to sit quietly on one of the park benches, and just watch the flow of people coming in and out of the park -- sometimes just passing through, to get from 72nd Street up to 73rd Street, sometimes coming down Broadway to enter the park at 73rd Street, but mostly entering or exiting the subway station.
You see all kinds of people here: students, bums, tourists (from New Jersey and from all four corners of the globe), office workers, homeless people, retired people, babysitters, children, soldiers, sanitation workers, lovers, friends, dogs, cats, pigeons, and a few things that simply defy description. Sometimes you see the same people over and over again; sometimes they follow a regular pattern at a particular time of the day, which always makes me smile — even though I never go up to them and introduce myself.
If I focus on the people coming south on Broadway, and entering the park at 73rd Street, and then continuing to walk southwards toward the subway entrance, I typically have five or ten seconds to (a) decide if they're sufficiently interesting to bother photographing,(b) wait for them to get in a position where I can get a clear shot of them, and (c) focus my camera on them and take several shots, in the hope that at least one or two of them will be well-focused and really interesting.
While you might get the impression that I photograph every single person who moves through this park, it's actually just the opposite: the overwhelming majority of people that I see here are just not all that interesting. (It's not that they're ugly, it's just that there's nothing interesting, memorable, or distinctive about them.) Even so, I might well take, say, 200 shots in the space of an hour. But some of them are repetitive or redundant, and others are blurred or out-of-focus, or technically defective in some other way. Of the ones that survive this kind of scrutiny, many turn out to be well-focused, nicely-composed, but ... well ... just "okay". I'll keep them on my computer, just in case, but I don't bother uploading them.
Typically, only about 1-2% of the photos I've taken get uploaded to Flickr -- e.g., about 5-10 photos from a one-hour session in which a thousand, or more, people have walked past me. There are some exceptions to this rule of thumb -- but in general, what you're seeing it is indeed only a tiny, tiny subset of the "real" street scene in New York City. On the other hand, it is reassuring to see that there are at least a few "interesting" people in a city that often has a reputation of being mean, cold, and heartless...
(more details later, as time permits)
*******************************
Another year has elapsed since I last photographed the tango dancers gathering on Pier 45 (where Christopher Street runs into the Hudson River in New York City's West Village), on the weekend before Labor Day, late-August 2014. But the sun was shining one weekend in early June of 2015, and I decided to venture down to Greenwich Village once again...
As I've mentioned in other Flickr sets, I have now met a few of the dancers at previous tango event over the past several; years, and I used to make a point of introducing myself to some of them, handing out business cards with my Flickr address so that people would be able to find these pictures without too much difficulty. But the dancers have good reason to be more interested in the music, and the movement of their partners, than a guy on the sideline with a camera -- so most of them have simply ignored me…
Altogether, I've now taken a dozen sets of tango-related photos, and you can see a thumbnail overview of them in this Flickr collection. And if you'd like to watch some other examples NYC tango dancing, check out Richard Lipkin's Guide to Argentine Tango in New York City.
Even though the dancers seem fresh and enthusiastic each time I come down here to Pier 45, I have a definite sense of deja vu: arguably, I’ve seen it all, I’ve photographed it all, I’ve heard all the tango music several times before. So I decided to do something different this time: I took all of the photos with my iPhone6+ camera. I used the “burst mode” feature on the camera-phone, so even though I took some 4,000 separate images, there were only about 400 “bursts,” and the iPhone hardware was kind enough to tell me which one or two images were reasonably sharp in each burst. From that smaller subset, I was eventually able to whittle things down to 50 images that I thought were okay for uploading to Flickr; that’s what you’ll see here.
Actually, the reason I was motivated to do all of this was not Flickr, but Instagram: for reasons that I can only assume are a stubborn testament to the “culture” of its community, Instagram insists on a “square” format, rather than the 3:2 or 4:3 aspect ratio favored by most DSLR and point-and-shoot cameras. Even worse, it insists that the photos be uploaded one-at-a-time from a mobile device. Ironically, this last restriction may prove to be too much; I’m uploading the photos to Flickr from my desktop Mac, but I don’t know if I’ll have the patience to upload them individually to Instagram…
Aside from that, I’ve concluded that the iPhone6+ is a handy little device for casual, ad hoc photos and videos; but it really doesn’t have the features I’ve come to depend on for the photos I want to publish. I won’t go into all of the technical details; chances are that you either don’t know, or don’t care, about those details. And if you do, chances are that you’ve made up your mind one way or another. As for me, I will definitely keep using the iPhone for some of my photos — especially the ones that really are casual, unplanned, ad hoc photos when I’ve got no other equipment that I can use. But with sophisticated little “pocket cameras” like the Sony RX-100 and Canon G7X, those moments are pretty rare for me … still, it was an interesting experiment.
As I've also pointed out in some previous Flickr albums, you can see a video version of the tango dancers from 2011, complete with music (which isn’t really tango music, but that’s okay), on my YouTube page; it’s here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqmnTQuwn54&list=UUUXim5Er2O4...
This was taken on the side of a building, at the intersection of Varick and King Street -- down in the SoHo district of New York.
The photograph was taken over the weekend, but it's being uploaded on a Monday. On the other hand, it's Memorial Day Monday, so perhaps that doesn't count ....
I'm not sure this is something to be proud of ... but it is another expression from a certain subset of New Yorkers. We're not all slackers here ... nor are we all wackos, winos, hippies, bums, or party animals.
But maybe we do work too hard ... at least some of us do. Some of the time. Especially on Mondays ...
Note: I chose this as my "photo of the day" for May 26, 2015.
***************
This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...
(more comments later, as time permits)
**********************************
This is a continuation of Flickr sets that I created in 2014 (shown here), 2013 (shown here)
2012 (shown here), 2011 (shown here), 2010 (shown here), 2009 (shown here), and 2008 (shown here) -- which, collectively, illustrate a variety of scenes and people in the small "pocket park" known as Verdi Square, located at 72nd Street and Broadway in New York City's Upper West Side, right by the 72nd St. IRT subway station.
I typically visit a local gym once or twice a week, and I get there by taking the downtown IRT express from my home (at 96th Street) down to the 72nd Street stop. Whenever possible, I try to schedule an extra 30-60 minutes to sit quietly on one of the park benches, and just watch the flow of people coming in and out of the park -- sometimes just passing through, to get from 72nd Street up to 73rd Street, sometimes coming down Broadway to enter the park at 73rd Street, but mostly entering or exiting the subway station.
You see all kinds of people here: students, bums, tourists (from New Jersey and from all four corners of the globe), office workers, homeless people, retired people, babysitters, children, soldiers, sanitation workers, lovers, friends, dogs, cats, pigeons, and a few things that simply defy description. Sometimes you see the same people over and over again; sometimes they follow a regular pattern at a particular time of the day, which always makes me smile — even though I never go up to them and introduce myself.
If I focus on the people coming south on Broadway, and entering the park at 73rd Street, and then continuing to walk southwards toward the subway entrance, I typically have five or ten seconds to (a) decide if they're sufficiently interesting to bother photographing,(b) wait for them to get in a position where I can get a clear shot of them, and (c) focus my camera on them and take several shots, in the hope that at least one or two of them will be well-focused and really interesting.
While you might get the impression that I photograph every single person who moves through this park, it's actually just the opposite: the overwhelming majority of people that I see here are just not all that interesting. (It's not that they're ugly, it's just that there's nothing interesting, memorable, or distinctive about them.) Even so, I might well take, say, 200 shots in the space of an hour. But some of them are repetitive or redundant, and others are blurred or out-of-focus, or technically defective in some other way. Of the ones that survive this kind of scrutiny, many turn out to be well-focused, nicely-composed, but ... well ... just "okay". I'll keep them on my computer, just in case, but I don't bother uploading them.
Typically, only about 1-2% of the photos I've taken get uploaded to Flickr -- e.g., about 5-10 photos from a one-hour session in which a thousand, or more, people have walked past me. There are some exceptions to this rule of thumb -- but in general, what you're seeing it is indeed only a tiny, tiny subset of the "real" street scene in New York City. On the other hand, it is reassuring to see that there are at least a few "interesting" people in a city that often has a reputation of being mean, cold, and heartless...
Heliconia, derived from the Greek word helikonios, is a genus of about 100 to 200 species of flowering plants which are native to the tropical Americas and Pacific Ocean islands west to Indonesia. Many species of Heliconia are found in rainforests or tropical wet forests of these regions. Common names for the genus include lobster-claws, wild plantains or false bird-of-paradise because of their close similarity to the bird-of-paradise flowers (Strelitzia). Collectively, these plants are also simply called Heliconias.
These plants range from 1 ½ to 15 feet tall depending on species. The simple leaves of these plants range from 6 inches to 10 feet. They are characteristically long, oblong, alternate, or growing opposite one another on non-woody petioles often longer than the leaf, often forming large clumps with age. Their flowers are produced on long, erect or drooping panicles, and consist of brightly colored waxy bracts with small true flowers peeping out. The growth habit of heliconias is similar to Canna, Strelitzia, and bananas, to which they are related. The flowers can be hues of reds, oranges, yellows, and greens. The plants typically flower during the wet season. The bracts protect the flowers; floral shape often limits pollination to a subset of hummingbirds.
Heliconias are grown for florists and as landscape plants in tropical regions all over the world. Heliconias need an abundance of water, sunlight, and soils rich in humus. The flower of H. psittacorum (Parrot Heliconia) is especially distinctive, its greenish-yellow flowers with black spots and red bracts are reminiscent of bright parrot plumage. Most commonly grown landscape Heliconia species include Heliconia augusta, H. bihai, H. brasiliensis, H. caribaea, H. latispatha, H. pendula, H. psittacorum, H. rostrata, H. schiediana, and H. wagneriana.
Heliconias are an important food source for forest hummingbirds, some of which (for example Rufous-breasted Hermit, Glaucis hirsuta) also use the plant for nesting. The Honduran White Bat, Ectophylla alba also lives in tents it makes from Heliconia leaves.
(more details later, as time permits)
************************
A year ago, I uploaded a bunch of photos to Flickr and admitted that while I had lived in New York City for 45 years — I had never previously attended, observed, photographed, or participated in the annual Halloween Parade that takes place in Greenwich Village. I won’t repeat the rest of the meandering blather that I wrote … if you would like to see it, and/or the photos that accompanied the notes, you can find them here on Flickr:
www.flickr.com/photos/yourdon/albums/72157646748393453
In any case, though, I decided to return to the parade again this year … and, like last year, I got off the subway at the Canal Street (express) station, and walked north to where the cops and the parade-floats, the bands and the professional photographers were gathering in anticipation of another year of festivity.
But I quickly discovered that, while last year’s parade started at 7 PM, when it was already cold and dark, this year’s parade was not scheduled to get started until 9 PM. I realize that 9 PM is quite an early hour for ghouls and vampires, not to mention teenagers, young adults, party-goers, and even the majority of the bridge-and-tunnel crowd who were presumably just getting in their trains and buses to make the trek from the wilderness regions of Long Island and New Jersey. But for those of us slightly (ahem) older than the age of 35, 9 PM is about the time when we turn on last night’s video-recording of Jimmy Fallon or Trevor Noah, and watch in a glassy-eyed stupor for a few minutes before we begin snoring …
So … I decided not to hang around the official starting position at Spring Street for two or three hours, and instead began wandering further north into the more crowded sections of the West Village — near West 4th Street. And I’m glad I did: while there were no bands or “fancy” displays, there was a lot more energy, and a lot of interesting costumes and people (or ghouls and vampires, depending on your preferences).
The only outcasts, far more confused and lost than the out-of-town tourists, were the cops. There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands; and this was two weeks before the recent terrorist attacks, with nobody expecting any trouble more serious than an occasional happy drunkard falling over in the street. Most of the cops that I saw were somehow affiliated with a “Community Affairs” department (or division, or whatever); but what made it funny is that none of them seemed to have a clue where they were. At one point, I stood near a friendly, attentive police officer at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 8th Street — when a tourist (sounding like he was from Germany) wandered up and asked the cop for directions to 9th Street. The cop shrugged politely and said that he really didn’t know — despite the fact that the street sign for 9th Street was clearly visible, less than a block away. I got the impression that the cops had been brought in from such far-away areas as Staten Island, Queens, and the Bronx; and while they could have navigated the neatly-rectangularized streets of mid-town Manhattan, they were utterly lost in Greenwich Village.
Oh, well, it didn’t matter. I watched one woman emerge from the subway, reassuring her clearly-terrified friend, “Don’t worry, I’ll get you back to New Jersey safely. I promise!” But she took one look at the wildly-costumed crowd around her, near the Waverly Theater, let out a loud “Woo hoo!” squeal, and left her friend behind….
In the midst of all this, I did manage to get some photos … and I’ve uploaded a small subset of them here to Flickr. Enjoy …
Heliconia, derived from the Greek word helikonios, is a genus of about 100 to 200 species of flowering plants which are native to the tropical Americas and Pacific Ocean islands west to Indonesia. Many species of Heliconia are found in rainforests or tropical wet forests of these regions. Common names for the genus include lobster-claws, wild plantains or false bird-of-paradise because of their close similarity to the bird-of-paradise flowers (Strelitzia). Collectively, these plants are also simply called Heliconias. See www.pacificfarmers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/An-Iden...
These plants range from 1 ½ to 15 feet tall depending on species. The simple leaves of these plants range from 6 inches to 10 feet. They are characteristically long, oblong, alternate, or growing opposite one another on non-woody petioles often longer than the leaf, often forming large clumps with age. Their flowers are produced on long, erect or drooping panicles, and consist of brightly colored waxy bracts with small true flowers peeping out. The growth habit of heliconias is similar to Canna, Strelitzia, and bananas, to which they are related. The flowers can be hues of reds, oranges, yellows, and greens. The plants typically flower during the wet season. The bracts protect the flowers; floral shape often limits pollination to a subset of hummingbirds.
Heliconias are grown for florists and as landscape plants in tropical regions all over the world. Heliconias need an abundance of water, sunlight, and soils rich in humus. The flower of H. psittacorum (Parrot Heliconia) is especially distinctive, its greenish-yellow flowers with black spots and red bracts are reminiscent of bright parrot plumage. Most commonly grown landscape Heliconia species include Heliconia augusta, H. bihai, H. brasiliensis, H. caribaea, H. latispatha, H. pendula, H. psittacorum, H. rostrata, H. schiediana, and H. wagneriana.
Heliconias are an important food source for forest hummingbirds, some of which (for example Rufous-breasted Hermit, Glaucis hirsuta) also use the plant for nesting. The Honduran White Bat, Ectophylla alba also lives in tents it makes from Heliconia leaves.
Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Miami FL
www.pacificfarmers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/An-Iden...
One of the things that’s interesting about living in a big city is the number of times in which we draw instant conclusions about strange sights on the street. To some extent, everything looks strange on Halloween, of course, but when you’re surrounded by 8 million strangers, you see strange, unexpected sights every day. You don’t have the time, the energy, or the interest to check out the details; so you make some “snap” judgments that get filed away temporarily in some recess of your mind, and you just keep walking.
As a street photographer, I am constantly told that I should stop and interact with the people I photograph; get to know them, learn enough about them so that the photographs tell a meaningful personal story without the need for any words. But the photo you’re looking at here has at least seven individuals, most of whom I’ll never see again. True, 6 of the 7 are walking away from me; and I could have stopped the figure in the red mask to find out who he is, where he comes from, and a thousand other details about his life. Maybe he (or she) was hoping I would do so; maybe that’s what he (or she) really wants. But for better or worse, I simply snapped a photo (actually, five photos in quick succession) and kept on walking.
But if I did not stop to chat with this individual, obviously you didn’t either. To you, this is just a momentary scene, captured as digital bits that float through the Internet. Chances are you’ll never see an image quite like this again, and you’ll never meet the man/woman or the dog. And most of the people looking at this image have never been to New York City, never set foot in Greenwich Village, and have no idea whether this is a common, daily scene — or just an anomaly that occurs once a year.
Be honest with yourself: if you’re human, you’ve drawn some conclusions about what you’re looking at. You have probably assumed, for example, that it is a man you’re looking at, not a woman. Why? Who knows … maybe it’s the body language, maybe it’s the choice of pants rather than a dress, maybe it’s some combination of a hundred other subtle clues.
I also conclude that I’m looking at a relatively young person; not a child, of course, but also not an elderly person in his 80s, and probably not even a middle-aged person. Why? Again, who knows? It might be as simple as the bias that older people simply would not “do” such a thing … and, of course, it might actually turn out that this snap judgment is utterly, totally wrong. Maybe it’s an old woman who is pushing the stroller down the street …
As for the scene itself — a costumed dog in a baby stroller — there are a thousand other snap judgments that we might make. I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, if a common response from people all across the United States would be something like, “Only a gay person in a sinful, wicked part of a big city would parade around looking like that.”
I mention that particular example of a snap judgment (which, of course, is likely to be utterly wrong) to make a point: when most of us see something that’s completely different from the “normal” scene we encounter every day, it’s hard to resist the (largely unconscious) temptation to make judgments, often negative and critical in nature. If you’re a virile heterosexual in a small midwestern town, perhaps you expect to see people walking down the street with their German shepherd, and maybe you expect to see a Halloween costume that involves a farmer carrying a shotgun. Or maybe you have some other, completely different mental image of what would be “normal” in whatever corner of the universe you live in. But when you see this scene, your first reaction is, “Wow, that’s different, and it’s weird.” And your section reaction might well be, “Not only is it weird, it’s wrong!”
That doesn’t happen to us, at least not as often, in a big city like New York. That’s because we see weird things all day long. Not just on Halloween, but every day of the week. Gradually, you begin to accept the reality that you, too, are weird — at least from the perspective of the other weird people you see on the street. Everyone is weird, in their own little way. If nothing else, it teaches us to be more tolerant, more inclusive, more accepting.
But I still don’t get the gold necklace this person is wearing. That is definitely weird. Very weird.
Note: I chose this as my "photo of the day" for Nov 18, 2015.
************************
A year ago, I uploaded a bunch of photos to Flickr and admitted that while I had lived in New York City for 45 years — I had never previously attended, observed, photographed, or participated in the annual Halloween Parade that takes place in Greenwich Village. I won’t repeat the rest of the meandering blather that I wrote … if you would like to see it, and/or the photos that accompanied the notes, you can find them here on Flickr:
www.flickr.com/photos/yourdon/albums/72157646748393453
In any case, though, I decided to return to the parade again this year … and, like last year, I got off the subway at the Canal Street (express) station, and walked north to where the cops and the parade-floats, the bands and the professional photographers were gathering in anticipation of another year of festivity.
But I quickly discovered that, while last year’s parade started at 7 PM, when it was already cold and dark, this year’s parade was not scheduled to get started until 9 PM. I realize that 9 PM is quite an early hour for ghouls and vampires, not to mention teenagers, young adults, party-goers, and even the majority of the bridge-and-tunnel crowd who were presumably just getting in their trains and buses to make the trek from the wilderness regions of Long Island and New Jersey. But for those of us slightly (ahem) older than the age of 35, 9 PM is about the time when we turn on last night’s video-recording of Jimmy Fallon or Trevor Noah, and watch in a glassy-eyed stupor for a few minutes before we begin snoring …
So … I decided not to hang around the official starting position at Spring Street for two or three hours, and instead began wandering further north into the more crowded sections of the West Village — near West 4th Street. And I’m glad I did: while there were no bands or “fancy” displays, there was a lot more energy, and a lot of interesting costumes and people (or ghouls and vampires, depending on your preferences).
The only outcasts, far more confused and lost than the out-of-town tourists, were the cops. There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands; and this was two weeks before the recent terrorist attacks, with nobody expecting any trouble more serious than an occasional happy drunkard falling over in the street. Most of the cops that I saw were somehow affiliated with a “Community Affairs” department (or division, or whatever); but what made it funny is that none of them seemed to have a clue where they were. At one point, I stood near a friendly, attentive police officer at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 8th Street — when a tourist (sounding like he was from Germany) wandered up and asked the cop for directions to 9th Street. The cop shrugged politely and said that he really didn’t know — despite the fact that the street sign for 9th Street was clearly visible, less than a block away. I got the impression that the cops had been brought in from such far-away areas as Staten Island, Queens, and the Bronx; and while they could have navigated the neatly-rectangularized streets of mid-town Manhattan, they were utterly lost in Greenwich Village.
Oh, well, it didn’t matter. I watched one woman emerge from the subway, reassuring her clearly-terrified friend, “Don’t worry, I’ll get you back to New Jersey safely. I promise!” But she took one look at the wildly-costumed crowd around her, near the Waverly Theater, let out a loud “Woo hoo!” squeal, and left her friend behind….
In the midst of all this, I did manage to get some photos … and I’ve uploaded a small subset of them here to Flickr. Enjoy …
Approaching the more central part of the West Village, it became apparent that some of the local residents preferred not to take an active part in the festivities ... but rather to put a modest scarecrow-figure on a bicycle that they had securely padlocked onto a street-sign ...
************************
A year ago, I uploaded a bunch of photos to Flickr and admitted that while I had lived in New York City for 45 years — I had never previously attended, observed, photographed, or participated in the annual Halloween Parade that takes place in Greenwich Village. I won’t repeat the rest of the meandering blather that I wrote … if you would like to see it, and/or the photos that accompanied the notes, you can find them here on Flickr:
www.flickr.com/photos/yourdon/albums/72157646748393453
In any case, though, I decided to return to the parade again this year … and, like last year, I got off the subway at the Canal Street (express) station, and walked north to where the cops and the parade-floats, the bands and the professional photographers were gathering in anticipation of another year of festivity.
But I quickly discovered that, while last year’s parade started at 7 PM, when it was already cold and dark, this year’s parade was not scheduled to get started until 9 PM. I realize that 9 PM is quite an early hour for ghouls and vampires, not to mention teenagers, young adults, party-goers, and even the majority of the bridge-and-tunnel crowd who were presumably just getting in their trains and buses to make the trek from the wilderness regions of Long Island and New Jersey. But for those of us slightly (ahem) older than the age of 35, 9 PM is about the time when we turn on last night’s video-recording of Jimmy Fallon or Trevor Noah, and watch in a glassy-eyed stupor for a few minutes before we begin snoring …
So … I decided not to hang around the official starting position at Spring Street for two or three hours, and instead began wandering further north into the more crowded sections of the West Village — near West 4th Street. And I’m glad I did: while there were no bands or “fancy” displays, there was a lot more energy, and a lot of interesting costumes and people (or ghouls and vampires, depending on your preferences).
The only outcasts, far more confused and lost than the out-of-town tourists, were the cops. There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands; and this was two weeks before the recent terrorist attacks, with nobody expecting any trouble more serious than an occasional happy drunkard falling over in the street. Most of the cops that I saw were somehow affiliated with a “Community Affairs” department (or division, or whatever); but what made it funny is that none of them seemed to have a clue where they were. At one point, I stood near a friendly, attentive police officer at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 8th Street — when a tourist (sounding like he was from Germany) wandered up and asked the cop for directions to 9th Street, the cop shrugged politely and said that he really didn’t know — despite the fact that the street sign for 9th Street was clearly visible, less than a block away. I got the impression that the cops had been brought in from such far-away areas as Staten Island, Queens, and the Bronx; and while they could have navigated the neatly-rectangularized streets of mid-town Manhattan, they were utterly lost in Greenwich Village.
Oh, well, it didn’t matter. I watched one woman emerge from the subway, reassuring her clearly-terrified friend, “Don’t worry, I’ll get you back to New Jersey safely. I promise!” But she took one look at the wildly-costumed crowd around her, near the Waverly Theater, let out a loud “Woo hoo!” squeal, and left her friend behind….
In the midst of all this, I did manage to get some photos … and I’ve uploaded a small subset of them here to Flickr. Enjoy …
This was taken on Mulberry between Prince & Spring, in the SoHo district of Manhattan.
***************
This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...
This was taken on Mott between Broome and Hester, in the Chinatown district of Manhattan.
***************
This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...
This was taken in Inside Tompkins Sq Park
(more details later, as time permits)
***************
This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...
(more details later, as time permits)
*******************************
Another year has elapsed since I last photographed the tango dancers gathering on Pier 45 (where Christopher Street runs into the Hudson River in New York City's West Village), on the weekend before Labor Day, late-August 2014. But the sun was shining one weekend in early June of 2015, and I decided to venture down to Greenwich Village once again...
As I've mentioned in other Flickr sets, I have now met a few of the dancers at previous tango event over the past several; years, and I used to make a point of introducing myself to some of them, handing out business cards with my Flickr address so that people would be able to find these pictures without too much difficulty. But the dancers have good reason to be more interested in the music, and the movement of their partners, than a guy on the sideline with a camera -- so most of them have simply ignored me…
Altogether, I've now taken a dozen sets of tango-related photos, and you can see a thumbnail overview of them in this Flickr collection. And if you'd like to watch some other examples NYC tango dancing, check out Richard Lipkin's Guide to Argentine Tango in New York City.
Even though the dancers seem fresh and enthusiastic each time I come down here to Pier 45, I have a definite sense of deja vu: arguably, I’ve seen it all, I’ve photographed it all, I’ve heard all the tango music several times before. So I decided to do something different this time: I took all of the photos with my iPhone6+ camera. I used the “burst mode” feature on the camera-phone, so even though I took some 4,000 separate images, there were only about 400 “bursts,” and the iPhone hardware was kind enough to tell me which one or two images were reasonably sharp in each burst. From that smaller subset, I was eventually able to whittle things down to 50 images that I thought were okay for uploading to Flickr; that’s what you’ll see here.
Actually, the reason I was motivated to do all of this was not Flickr, but Instagram: for reasons that I can only assume are a stubborn testament to the “culture” of its community, Instagram insists on a “square” format, rather than the 3:2 or 4:3 aspect ratio favored by most DSLR and point-and-shoot cameras. Even worse, it insists that the photos be uploaded one-at-a-time from a mobile device. Ironically, this last restriction may prove to be too much; I’m uploading the photos to Flickr from my desktop Mac, but I don’t know if I’ll have the patience to upload them individually to Instagram…
Aside from that, I’ve concluded that the iPhone6+ is a handy little device for casual, ad hoc photos and videos; but it really doesn’t have the features I’ve come to depend on for the photos I want to publish. I won’t go into all of the technical details; chances are that you either don’t know, or don’t care, about those details. And if you do, chances are that you’ve made up your mind one way or another. As for me, I will definitely keep using the iPhone for some of my photos — especially the ones that really are casual, unplanned, ad hoc photos when I’ve got no other equipment that I can use. But with sophisticated little “pocket cameras” like the Sony RX-100 and Canon G7X, those moments are pretty rare for me … still, it was an interesting experiment.
As I've also pointed out in some previous Flickr albums, you can see a video version of the tango dancers from 2011, complete with music (which isn’t really tango music, but that’s okay), on my YouTube page; it’s here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqmnTQuwn54&list=UUUXim5Er2O4...
(more details later, as time permits)
************************
A year ago, I uploaded a bunch of photos to Flickr and admitted that while I had lived in New York City for 45 years — I had never previously attended, observed, photographed, or participated in the annual Halloween Parade that takes place in Greenwich Village. I won’t repeat the rest of the meandering blather that I wrote … if you would like to see it, and/or the photos that accompanied the notes, you can find them here on Flickr:
www.flickr.com/photos/yourdon/albums/72157646748393453
In any case, though, I decided to return to the parade again this year … and, like last year, I got off the subway at the Canal Street (express) station, and walked north to where the cops and the parade-floats, the bands and the professional photographers were gathering in anticipation of another year of festivity.
But I quickly discovered that, while last year’s parade started at 7 PM, when it was already cold and dark, this year’s parade was not scheduled to get started until 9 PM. I realize that 9 PM is quite an early hour for ghouls and vampires, not to mention teenagers, young adults, party-goers, and even the majority of the bridge-and-tunnel crowd who were presumably just getting in their trains and buses to make the trek from the wilderness regions of Long Island and New Jersey. But for those of us slightly (ahem) older than the age of 35, 9 PM is about the time when we turn on last night’s video-recording of Jimmy Fallon or Trevor Noah, and watch in a glassy-eyed stupor for a few minutes before we begin snoring …
So … I decided not to hang around the official starting position at Spring Street for two or three hours, and instead began wandering further north into the more crowded sections of the West Village — near West 4th Street. And I’m glad I did: while there were no bands or “fancy” displays, there was a lot more energy, and a lot of interesting costumes and people (or ghouls and vampires, depending on your preferences).
The only outcasts, far more confused and lost than the out-of-town tourists, were the cops. There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands; and this was two weeks before the recent terrorist attacks, with nobody expecting any trouble more serious than an occasional happy drunkard falling over in the street. Most of the cops that I saw were somehow affiliated with a “Community Affairs” department (or division, or whatever); but what made it funny is that none of them seemed to have a clue where they were. At one point, I stood near a friendly, attentive police officer at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 8th Street — when a tourist (sounding like he was from Germany) wandered up and asked the cop for directions to 9th Street. The cop shrugged politely and said that he really didn’t know — despite the fact that the street sign for 9th Street was clearly visible, less than a block away. I got the impression that the cops had been brought in from such far-away areas as Staten Island, Queens, and the Bronx; and while they could have navigated the neatly-rectangularized streets of mid-town Manhattan, they were utterly lost in Greenwich Village.
Oh, well, it didn’t matter. I watched one woman emerge from the subway, reassuring her clearly-terrified friend, “Don’t worry, I’ll get you back to New Jersey safely. I promise!” But she took one look at the wildly-costumed crowd around her, near the Waverly Theater, let out a loud “Woo hoo!” squeal, and left her friend behind….
In the midst of all this, I did manage to get some photos … and I’ve uploaded a small subset of them here to Flickr. Enjoy …
Note: I chose this as my "photo of the day" for Jun 10, 2015.
Note: this photo was chosen by Flickr to be included in its "Explored!" list on June 10, 2015.
I have no way of knowing, but I've decided that the two people in the center of the photo are a couple. Maybe father and daughter. Maybe just a guy and a friend. But I think there's something more than simple friendship going on here ...
**********************************
This is a continuation of Flickr sets that I created in 2014 (shown here), 2013 (shown here) 2012 (shown here), 2011 (shown here), 2010 (shown here), 2009 (shown here), and 2008 (shown here) -- which, collectively, illustrate a variety of scenes and people in the small "pocket park" known as Verdi Square, located at 72nd Street and Broadway in New York City's Upper West Side, right by the 72nd St. IRT subway station.
I typically visit a local gym once or twice a week, and I get there by taking the downtown IRT express from my home (at 96th Street) down to the 72nd Street stop. Whenever possible, I try to schedule an extra 30-60 minutes to sit quietly on one of the park benches, and just watch the flow of people coming in and out of the park -- sometimes just passing through, to get from 72nd Street up to 73rd Street, sometimes coming down Broadway to enter the park at 73rd Street, but mostly entering or exiting the subway station.
You see all kinds of people here: students, bums, tourists (from New Jersey and from all four corners of the globe), office workers, homeless people, retired people, babysitters, children, soldiers, sanitation workers, lovers, friends, dogs, cats, pigeons, and a few things that simply defy description. Sometimes you see the same people over and over again; sometimes they follow a regular pattern at a particular time of the day, which always makes me smile — even though I never go up to them and introduce myself.
If I focus on the people coming south on Broadway, and entering the park at 73rd Street, and then continuing to walk southwards toward the subway entrance, I typically have five or ten seconds to (a) decide if they're sufficiently interesting to bother photographing,(b) wait for them to get in a position where I can get a clear shot of them, and (c) focus my camera on them and take several shots, in the hope that at least one or two of them will be well-focused and really interesting.
While you might get the impression that I photograph every single person who moves through this park, it's actually just the opposite: the overwhelming majority of people that I see here are just not all that interesting. (It's not that they're ugly, it's just that there's nothing interesting, memorable, or distinctive about them.) Even so, I might well take, say, 200 shots in the space of an hour. But some of them are repetitive or redundant, and others are blurred or out-of-focus, or technically defective in some other way. Of the ones that survive this kind of scrutiny, many turn out to be well-focused, nicely-composed, but ... well ... just "okay". I'll keep them on my computer, just in case, but I don't bother uploading them.
Typically, only about 1-2% of the photos I've taken get uploaded to Flickr -- e.g., about 5-10 photos from a one-hour session in which a thousand, or more, people have walked past me. There are some exceptions to this rule of thumb -- but in general, what you're seeing it is indeed only a tiny, tiny subset of the "real" street scene in New York City. On the other hand, it is reassuring to see that there are at least a few "interesting" people in a city that often has a reputation of being mean, cold, and heartless...
Revising an old spot to rephotograph an already overphotographed location and finally meeting a new friend.
Increasingly, I find the former fills me with a vague sense of dread. I don’t know if it is because of the dislike of déjà vu turned real, or the fear that the resulting photos will be a substandard subset of the snaps taken before.
As for the later, there is a smalling tingling of curious apprehension. Will they be as affable in the flesh as their virtual world persona? Will I find them sitting waiting for me, sharpening their axe and organizing the various paraphernalia needed to dispose of my lifeless, dissected body? Will they find me a total wanker?
In reverse order (except for the wanker bit… it is not my conclusion to make)...
Wildlife & Nature Photography is a thoroughly lovely person who made this shoot a most enjoyable occasion. Having spend a long time interacting in the infinite universe of Flickr, there was a small raising of the eyebrow of surprise to find my Flickr-buddy lived just down the road from me. I trust this will not be the last shoot we do together. Especially as she does not seem to possess a hatchet and shovel in her photography kit bag.
I was lucky with the clouds a Normanton Church. And the evening mosquitos. The drifting blobs of condensation added a bit of interest to the sunset and the biting buggers, that will fly tens of miles just to feast on my O-positive blood, seemed to be distracted by the drone pilot what was also doing the cliched shot of the church.
Overall, a thoroughly enjoyable evening.
This was taken on Thompson between Spring & Broome.
***************
This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...
This was the scene as I got off the subway and started hearing uptown.
You can find Laight Street on a city map if you look carefully enough ... but basically, I was at the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Canal Street.
As you can see, some people were doing their best to ignore the Halloween festival altogether; and even the ones wearing costumes were often doing their best to avoid looking too outlandish.
************************
A year ago, I uploaded a bunch of photos to Flickr and admitted that while I had lived in New York City for 45 years — I had never previously attended, observed, photographed, or participated in the annual Halloween Parade that takes place in Greenwich Village. I won’t repeat the rest of the meandering blather that I wrote … if you would like to see it, and/or the photos that accompanied the notes, you can find them here on Flickr:
www.flickr.com/photos/yourdon/albums/72157646748393453
In any case, though, I decided to return to the parade again this year … and, like last year, I got off the subway at the Canal Street (express) station, and walked north to where the cops and the parade-floats, the bands and the professional photographers were gathering in anticipation of another year of festivity.
But I quickly discovered that, while last year’s parade started at 7 PM, when it was already cold and dark, this year’s parade was not scheduled to get started until 9 PM. I realize that 9 PM is quite an early hour for ghouls and vampires, not to mention teenagers, young adults, party-goers, and even the majority of the bridge-and-tunnel crowd who were presumably just getting in their trains and buses to make the trek from the wilderness regions of Long Island and New Jersey. But for those of us slightly (ahem) older than the age of 35, 9 PM is about the time when we turn on last night’s video-recording of Jimmy Fallon or Trevor Noah, and watch in a glassy-eyed stupor for a few minutes before we begin snoring …
So … I decided not to hang around the official starting position at Spring Street for two or three hours, and instead began wandering further north into the more crowded sections of the West Village — near West 4th Street. And I’m glad I did: while there were no bands or “fancy” displays, there was a lot more energy, and a lot of interesting costumes and people (or ghouls and vampires, depending on your preferences).
The only outcasts, far more confused and lost than the out-of-town tourists, were the cops. There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands; and this was two weeks before the recent terrorist attacks, with nobody expecting any trouble more serious than an occasional happy drunkard falling over in the street. Most of the cops that I saw were somehow affiliated with a “Community Affairs” department (or division, or whatever); but what made it funny is that none of them seemed to have a clue where they were. At one point, I stood near a friendly, attentive police officer at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 8th Street — when a tourist (sounding like he was from Germany) wandered up and asked the cop for directions to 9th Street, the cop shrugged politely and said that he really didn’t know — despite the fact that the street sign for 9th Street was clearly visible, less than a block away. I got the impression that the cops had been brought in from such far-away areas as Staten Island, Queens, and the Bronx; and while they could have navigated the neatly-rectangularized streets of mid-town Manhattan, they were utterly lost in Greenwich Village.
Oh, well, it didn’t matter. I watched one woman emerge from the subway, reassuring her clearly-terrified friend, “Don’t worry, I’ll get you back to New Jersey safely. I promise!” But she took one look at the wildly-costumed crowd around her, near the Waverly Theater, let out a loud “Woo hoo!” squeal, and left her friend behind….
In the midst of all this, I did manage to get some photos … and I’ve uploaded a small subset of them here to Flickr. Enjoy …