While this shot is at least as much about the SunTrust Bank building in the background, I love how the cyclist passing through the shot turned out – he’s obviously in motion, with a lock of hair blown up and back as he moves. The blurred face makes it somewhat anonymous, an everyman on his way somewhere quickly, turning his head just long enough to look back at the camera looking at him. Actually kind of a rarity these days.
Cyclist, SunTrust Building
I liked the graphic design of his t-shirt so I set up my camera before he started crossing the street and waited until he was in “the zone” to snap the picture. He’s not tack-sharp because we were both moving at the time, but I think the slight softness of him and the people around him give a sense of movement as well as depth.
Nine Cups T-shirt
When I saw this character I had to photograph him – giant headphones combined with the fat stogie? How could you NOT?
Given the looming Watergate break-in anniversary in June, I thought it apropos to post some images of the historic complex to let folks get an idea of what the place looks like. The name itself is so iconic, so much larger-than-life, I think it tends to overwhelm all thoughts of what the place actually is. This was not some garden-variety office tower. Even back-in-the-day, this was a very high-end residential, hotel and office complex, with views of the Potomac River, Georgetown and the Kennedy Center. It is across the street from the Saudi Embassy and a scant several blocks to the State Department headquarters. The place positively reeks of old money – it’s quiet as a tomb at all hours of the day and night.
Watergate Terrace
There are people around, as you can see in the image above, but they never seem to be coming or going in groups, or with any volume. Spaces where you’d expect to see lots of people, like around the fountain, or in the courtyard, are usually very quiet.
I’m particularly pleased at how well the first fountain shot turned out because of the white-on-white challenge. I was able to photograph it so that the white stayed bright but retained detail. It’s kind of like the egg challenge often assigned in studio photography classes – put an egg on a white backdrop and photograph the egg so the shell texture retains detail but is still white.
Watergate Fountain
A very different mood for the same subject, just by changing the camera position and therefore the lighting on the subject.
Watergate Fountain
I love the balconies on the Watergate complex – they wrap around it in undulating curves and add texture to what would otherwise be an extremely plain building. Seen from a distance, as a colleague of mine put it, the Watergate does look a bit like a cruise ship the 1960s forgot.
Watergate BalconiesWatergate Balconies
Another view of the courtyard. Again, just one person sitting alone at a table. There’s a restaurant down there, believe it or not.
Watergate Courtyard
The Watergate is a great place to practice architectural abstraction because of its size, shape and textures. This view feels like a whole bunch of zippers fanning out in a display.
I know these have nothing to do whatever with each other beyond the fact they were all captured here in Washington DC.
A rather rare sighting – a Dodge Viper hardtop coupe on the street. They’re big, they’re bad, they don’t make good city driving. So it was unusual to spot one parked at curbside. I didn’t even realize the driver was still sitting in the car when taking the picture until I came around to the side to take another look at it, and he waved at me.
Dodge Viper Nose
The back door to the Wonderland Ballroom. I was walking past it on my way home from another neighborhood walkabout and saw the sunset glow illuminating the upper story. Now an extremely popular neighborhood hangout that draws a youthful/hipster crowd, it was in its previous incarnation the oldest continuously operating gay bar in the city. It catered to an African-American male clientele, but the owner shuttered the club when he realized his patrons were mostly the same dozen or so elderly men who would come in, drink one beer all night, and sit around chit-chatting with each other. You can’t run a business on less than a dozen beer sales a night, even if you do own the building.
Wonderland Ballroom Backdoor, Sunset
This is a liquor store near my office. I loved the old-fashioned lettering in the window that preserved the feeling the store was trapped in a 1940s time warp. I think it was the original lettering as it has the same feel as the Art Deco facade of the building. This highlights the importance of photographing things you see when you see them as they may not be there tomorrow – when I passed the store yesterday on my way back from lunch, they had replaced the old painted lettering in the window with what looked like a piece of white foam board with blue printed lettering, which while easier to read was nowhere near as pretty.
Riverside Liquors
Another scene near my office – columns for a pergola, casting shadows across the brick pavers on the plaza.
Ok, so you’ve seen me posting images of the PAHO/WHO headquarters building for the last few weeks. Here are some shots of the flags outside. There are 29 member nations, from Argentina to the United States, but also including France, Great Britain, and Spain.
Here they are snapping in a brisk breeze, with the Washington Monument visible in the background:
Flags, Pan-American Health Organization
A close-up of several flags, with the PAHO building as the backdrop:
Flags, Pan-American Health Organization
Looking up into the flags with the mid-day sun backlighting them:
Just some random captures of people out and about. I want to get better at street candids, so I’m practicing. These are a few good examples, at least I think they’re good, for me.
I saw this man crossing the street early in the morning, loaded down with his bags. I don’t think this shot would have worked in black-and-white – the hodgepodge of tweed jacket, American flag logo bag, Adidas bag, and the plastic shopping bag wouldn’t pop if they were tonally similar.
Man Crossing with Bags
I’ve posted the boy on the bus sleeping before. This one DOES work better in black-and-white because the brightness of his hat and shirt contrast with his skin color and give him a very peaceful, almost angelic look.
Boy Sleeping On Bus
This man is watching the overhead sign announcing the upcoming station. I caught him in an unguarded moment, doing what everyone does on the train. Hard to tell if he’s a tourist or a local.
I’ve walked past the giant red JALEO letters in the window of Jaleo, a Spanish tapas restaurant downtown DC, for years, wanting to photograph them but never really getting it the way I want. The first shot comes the closest. To get what I’d like to get, I’d have to stand in the street, in the winter, and cut down the trees out front as well. So this will have to do.
Jaleo Outside
A view into the restaurant. Photographically, what interests me in taking an image like this is the visual layering that happens – there’s reflections in the glass, the big red J, the people at the table, the pendant lights leading you away deep inside the restaurant, the other patrons at tables in the rear. Sociologically, this is another indictment of the modern life – two people at dinner staring at their phones instead of interacting with each other.
Jaleo Inside
It’s a sad commentary on how inward-focused we as a society have become that it is socially acceptable for two people (or more!) to go to dinner together and interact more with their digital devices than with the other human beings at the same table. We’re there to do one of the most basic and most pleasurable things two or more humans can do – share a meal. Put down the damn phone at the dinner table!
More in my Commuter Diary series. These are more about the people on the train and in the station than they are about the stations and trains.
The man in the suit stands out not only from his attire but also from his posture and from actually standing apart from the other riders on the platform waiting for a train.
Man in Suit
This was a visual experiment for me, to see what it would look like to follow a moving subject. This man was talking furiously on his phone, pacing back and forth in an erratic elliptical orbit of a spot on the platform.
Man, Pacing with Phone
The flow of people is remarkably sharp given the length of time I had the shutter open for (several seconds). The repetition of people’s shapes going down the escalator is from the escalator being turned off and them walking down, so they pause just long enough between strides that they register over and over again. I’m going to re-try this experiment and see how many repetitions I can capture.
Down Escalator Flow
Another typical experience in the daily life of a commuter – watching the person in front of you as you ride up the escalator.
I’m still learning how to shoot candid street scenes. This is a relative success story. I got on film what I imagined when I composed and shot this image – shallow depth of field emphasizing the boy with the red sneakers and mirror sunglasses. I saw him coming toward me, guesstimate focused a distance, then clicked the shutter when he hit that point. There was another shot I took on the same walkabout of a little boy clowning around on one of the bikeshare bikes that I had to guess the focus, and I missed, which was very disappointing because it was a cute composition.
Street Style
I’m on the fence about the crop, though. Does it draw too much attention away from the boy in the red sneakers?
I’ve been photographing the World Health Organization building in black and white, regularly, because the architecture lends itself so very nicely to geometric abstracts. Here it is in color, to show a different take on photo abstraction and the creation of meaning in an image.
World Health Organization, Sky ArcWorld Health Organization, Sky ‘V’World Health Organization End, ‘Monolith’PAHO/WHO Building
The building itself was designed by Uruguayan architect Roman Fresnedo Siri. In 1961, Siri won an international design competition with his arc and cylinder concept. Construction was begun in 1963 and the building opened officially on September 27, 1965. There are bronze plaques on the face of the tower representing each of the 29 member nations.
I saw this hose connector for watering the planter box down the street from my office and the blue handle contrasted perfectly with the new green grass around it. The light filtering through the tree leaves above the planter box made dappled patterns in the grass and softened up the scene so that the contrast was created through color as much as it was through brightness and darkness. The shallow depth-of-field really makes the blue of the handle pop out even more against the sea of green.
Hose Connector
It was also the perfect opportunity to test out the macro capability of my Tele-Rollei with the Rolleinar 1 close-up set.A friend of mine had advised me that the Rolleinars made for the standard Rollei work just fine with the Tele-Rolleiflex. There were a separate set of Rolleinars originally designed for the Tele, and they look somewhat different. I was concerned that the parallax-correcting prism for the viewing lens in the Rolleinar set for the standard would over-correct and the composition would be off, but it doesn’t, as can be seen here. The pump handle is in exactly the spot I composed for.
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