Fifty Favorites, Number Six

3 February '08 - At first glance this picture looks like just a black square. But if you expand the image and examine it closely, it reveals an aspect of NYC that a night shift taxi driver is familiar with.  Two people are standing there in the shadows, the burning ends of their cigarettes and the illumination of a cell phone creating tiny specks of light.  

Fifty Favorites, Number Five

26 August '07 - Interesting juxtapositions can pop up quite randomly.  In this shot it looks like she could step right out of the advertisement on the side of the telephone booth and join her family.

Fifty Favorites, Number Four

17 July '07 - New York City is bursting with messages.  It's one of my favorite subjects.  This fellow, tempting fate, caught my eye while waiting for a red light in Midtown.

Fifty Favorites, Number Three

30 Jan '07 -  Spare parts can be found in all taxi garages.  In this shot you can tell by the tint of yellow on the windows that the painting of cabs is done in the same room.

Fifty Favorites, Number Two

9 Dec '06.  Some shots, due to reflections or peculiar arrangements, appear montage-like.  I took this shot through the window of a liquor shop while stuck in traffic on the Upper East Side.  Somehow the man inside, who looks like he's superimposed on the picture, made eye contact with me as I took the shot.

Fifty Favorites, Number One

This picture really was number one.  It was the first picture I published in this blog, back on Nov. 24, 2006.  I was stopped at a red light in Times Square and found myself beside this beautiful model  posing on the median which separated Broadway from 7th Avenue.   

Pictures From A Taxi -- 10th Anniversary

It's Pictures From A Taxi's tenth anniversary today.

New York could be called a street photographer's heaven.  People of every description, things that suddenly jump out at you from their secret hiding places, profound oddities, dogs, the occasional coyote... this city is just begging to be photographed.

I decided to start carrying a digital camera (with a hefty zoom lens) around with me in my cab in 2006 for several reasons.  For one thing, it would make my already adventurous profession even more interesting.  Instead of just waiting for the light to change, I am scanning the the sidewalks for a shot.  A second reason was because with digital it is so much more doable than it had been prior to that revolution in the world of photography.  No more waiting for your film to be developed.  Instant editing that would have taken hours in a darkroom.  And a third reason was because I wanted to add "mass" to the "significance" of my other blog, Cabs Are For Kissing, which is mostly text without many pictures.  Instead of just publishing random photos of New York to accompany the posts in that blog, I thought it better to create a whole new blog of nothing but photographs.

So that was ten years ago.  For quite a few years I was publishing a new picture virtually every day, so the quantity of pictures has really added up.  There are to date exactly 2,220 posts, each consisting of simply a picture, or maybe two or three if it was warranted.  There would be many more, but let me tell you something about street photography -- you've got to be really fast!  For every shot I got there are ten I missed because I didn't have enough time to pick up my camera and shoot.  Things happen very quickly out there, plus I'm often moving myself (although I'm proud to say that on some occasions that has not prevented me from getting the shot).

Recently I completed a rather massive project of indexing all the pictures in the blog by subject matter (which I should have been doing all along).  So if you click on the label below each picture you will see other pictures with the same theme.  And of course if you click on the picture itself it will blow up in size, quite possibly revealing details you may have missed in the smaller version.  Just saying.

What I have decided to do to celebrate this momentous occasion is to pick out my fifty favorites from all these images.  For the next fifty days I will re-publish one photograph a day from the collection, a picture that in my own opinion is one of my best.  (I apologize in advance to all the pictures that were not chosen.  You know I love you all, but let's be honest, some of you are just not as good as the others.)

So I hope you'll stop by over these next few weeks to see the ones I've chosen.  In no particular order, my Fifty Favorites.