The streets are alive| street photography photo blog

Moving day

This wonderful photo-blog moved to a <<better place>> see you there!

Rain in L.A.

It doesn’t rain much in Los Angeles but when it does, the result is a great panic.
Traffic is even worse than usual, the city ends up looking like a big lake due to a bad drainage system, and mudslides are winter’s answer to summer’s fires.
The local news stations send out their “storm watch” teams to cover live how the brave LA natives are handling the drizzle.
And they do handle it pretty well;
armed with winter gear and umbrellas they abandon the streets to find cover in the malls and coffee shops.

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Westwood Village

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blog software

I'm going to move this blog from typepad to my server and I have a question to all you experts around here:
What is the best PHOTO-blog software out there??

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Queens, NY

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so who's afraid of photoshop?

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New Jersey

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The lost bats of Austin

As the night falls over Austin, the bats come out of their official residence underneath Congress Bridge and fly over Town Lake and into the fields around town in a search for food.  This sight is often described as spectacular since some million bats cover the evening sky like a black cloud and for a while the sky turns dark.
So there we were, standing at dusk on Congress Bridge, trying to keep warm and watching the sky above us for bats.
“If this is the right place for bat watching then how come there’s not even one person here, only us, ah?” I asked after a few minutes of silence.
“Oh, this is obviously due to the rain” explained my brother “You know how people are… unlike us, they look outside the window, notice a few drops of rain and decide to stay home”. 
We, no doubt, felt very brave, standing there in the rain, hating every passing car which swooshed by, but, never the less, we were there to see the bats and a few raindrops or freezing toes would not scare us away.
Meanwhile it got dark. 
“Are you sure this is the right bridge? I am certain I saw a few other bridges on the way here and they looked just as good as this one.” 
“Don’t worry, the bats will come out any second now,” alleged my brother “They need to eat sometimes, no?” 
Yes, the bats must eat tonight; it did make a lot of sense at the time so we stayed longer hopping from leg to leg trying to stay warm. 
After a while my expectations to see ANY bat tonight were so low that I was ready to compromise for even just one little bat which might glide right above our heads and into the horizon….
Aha, that would have been such a delightful sight!
Epilog: As we neglected reading the information about the bats of Austin beyond the first few lines we had no idea at this time of year, and while we were standing on Congress Bridge, our lost bats were all hanging out somewhere in Mexico with no plans of coming back to Austin until Spring.             
Austin, Texas 2004

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Colorful raindrop

Colorful raindrop .  in New York City  . dripping slowly on the window . of the yellow cab

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End of day

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Hollywood

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My favorite photo

Maybe it’s a bit surprising, heck I’m surprised myself, but the picture here is my favorite photo of this past year’s photo-blogging.
So why this one? 
Maybe because it’s the only time I took a picture I imagined beforehand.  See, whenever I leave home with a camera I have no clue what pictures I’m going to stumble upon so no way could I visualize any of them.  For me, this is one of the elements which make street photography exciting and magical.
However, this image... I saw it in my mind long before I actually “found” it, so much that I was actually “searching” for it every time I was out there… but this is the kind of a slippery aim and I had no idea how you discover something so deceptive until that evening when I was standing on the corner of Sunset & Vine in Hollywood, just about to cross the street when I saw this car in the corner of my eye. It was waiting the red light and so gave me just enough time to get ready for it.  What I wasn’t ready for is that the guy will be speeding up right as the light changed to green, which naturally forced me into panning along with the car.

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One year

So it has been almost a year since I began posting here. A year which had gone by waaay too fast!
156 posts/photos, 1783 comments, and 1 author (me!).  Not too bad. 
And you’re probably thinking I love all these photos equally and no way could I possibly favor one over the other, but of course you’re wrong (sorry!). 
Thus in the next post I will tell you which one is my very favorite picture for this year. Maybe I’ll even explain why. 
Meanwhile, take a look; here are most of the photos I posted in the last year:  http://thestreets.typepad.com/photos/thestreets/

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Tango dancers

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Driving in San Francisco

After all these years of driving in Los Angeles, I regarded myself as a true L.A. traffic survivor and strongly believed I’d earned my place in the driving hall of fame.  I had put in many hours stuck behind old ladies on side streets.  I did time sitting in traffic on the 405 on hot muggy days. And I’d always so gracefully bit my tongue when the other drivers wished me and my immediate family members all kind of exotic illnesses and unusual disasters.
So clearly when my friend, David G., asked me to drive his car up to San Francisco I laughed at the challenge.  This is going to be a piece of cake I humbly said.
Sure enough, the drive up the California coast was a delight.   Everything was just right: the open roads, the no-name towns where I got my coffee, the small got-frozen-in-the-60’s diners, the friendly faces of the locals, the pleasant weather and even the lovely smell of cows didn’t bother me at all.  And so after a few hours of smooth driving I arrived at San Francisco.
I called David G.
He was still at work and asked me if I could be so kind as to drive by his office and pick him up. 
“Sure, no problem, besides, it’s a childhood dream of mine to be a personal chauffer.”
As it turned out the office where David worked was located on Market Street in Downtown SF, and so when I found the place I pulled over by the office building and waited. 
It took just about 10 seconds for a policeman to show up out of nowhere.  Very politely he told me I couldn’t stop my car there and I’d have to continue driving.  And this is how my big adventure of driving in Downtown San Francisco began. 
It didn’t take me long to find out all the roads in the area are one way streets, and never the way I wanted to go.  Returning to the same place in front of the office building where David G. was patiently waiting for me was just an impossible task.   After just a few minutes of driving I had no idea where I was or where I should go next.  Considering stopping to ask for directions or checking out the map seemed to provoke the sensible San Francisco drivers to honk fiercely and jumpy policemen to run at my car yelling words of encouragement to keep driving and return to where I came from.   
After the worst half hour of driving in my life when I gave up all hope of ever finding my way through the Downtown streets of San Francisco or to ever again be reunited with my loving family, I found myself on Market Street again.  Not that I had any idea which direction I was going but since I could not stop I just kept on going and there, right there, in a bus stop, happily waving to me I saw David G. 

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The real value

Sure it is nice when a picture has an artistic value which makes it hangable on walls of a gallery, presentable for sale and printed in an art magazine.
But I believe the REAL value of photography is in its HISTORICAL VALUE and its ability to explain life as we know it.

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The Empire State building, NYC

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