Street photography

There are many things I love in life, and two of those are photography & my cell phone. So I am in bliss when I am able to use the latter to help the former. I'm talking cell phone pictures. I should probably call them pix; it's more fitting for someone so deeply attached to their celly. Or should celly be spelled with an -ie... I need to consult with a 14 year old and get back to you. Having a camera built into my cell phone is incredible. How did people survive without either of those two inventions? Life simply did not exist before the year 2000. How did people do anything?

In the past few months my beloved cellphone has been trudging along towards the great big recycling center in the sky. While it couldn't reliably receive phone calls or text messages, it could take some decent pictures. (And at the end, I was very grateful it could do anything, really.)

So before the end came, I cleared out a lot of the photos I took with the cell over the course of the last year. A lot of the time the photos look and feel like art. (Maybe one day, it will be). Take, for example, a photo shot while at a dance party my senior year. The shadows and the ground color from the colored lights of the dance, coupled with the dancer's feet, just looks really, really cool. And what is art if not cool and entertaining? (At least the art that I enjoy.)

Sometimes the photos I take offer up information about our culture, like the pictures I like to take of intriguing graffiti. There's Stop sign grafitti, like this first one in New Orleans, and the second two in separate sides of Massachusetts state. 

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They say, "STOP War!,"STOP Global warming," and "STOP Bush." I like the idea that separate people felt the need to deface local stop signs with a message. Even if those are clearly only the liberals. I want to find more. (Stop sign defacement. But liberals too, I suppose.) The Stop Bush sign says "4-way" written underneath it, which I think we can all agree is something that should be stopped.

Then there are the photos I take of patterns I find interesting, like the little mirrors under the tealights on my bedroom wall.

and the collage over the pedestrian walkway at the MGH t-stop...







As most cell phones nowadays, there are also incriminating photos, like this of a certain street sign that allegedly was removed. Allegedly.

Then there's stuff that you take a picture of because it's just so ridiculous. Like this sign the MBTA made when the blue train shut down unexpectedly for the night. In blue sharpie.

Sure, that looks legit. Let's all ride the blue line.






And now I have a new and fully functional and photography-enabled phone. Life is good.