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Emulating the crossing sign.  

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The Row of Umbrellas

It was just starting to rain... but not too hard.  I saw a number of people waiting for the bus across the street aligned in a row against the Ampelmann construction wall.  (By the way, this wall has been up for two years and there has been no building appearing above the wall... not sure what's going on).  The bus folks all had their umbrellas with them and it was an interesting formation, especially juxtaposed with the people represented on the wall.  

I thought this might look even better if I were across the street myself where I could see them juxtaposted against each other.  Only problem with this scenario was that I was covered and dry across the street standing under a construction scaffold.  Out in the open, I would need to balance my own umbrella in one hand with my camera shooting one handed.  This would have been difficult with my Canon 40D, but with my new Sony NEX-7 camera, the small size makes it much more tolerable.  

What I found across the street, logically, were two rows of people leaving an opening for pedestrians up the center to pass.  Unusually orderedly, I would say.

People then passed between the two rows.  Somehow, this reminded of a dance line in a wedding, where people would dance up the aisle between the two rows of people.   They would come through strutting their stuff and showing their own individual moves.  This was only in my imagination, but I watched for a few minutes as people walked the sidewalk towards and away from me.

This one below, looks like a dance, but actually I think the guy on the left is reaching for an umbrella (which you can see in the next shot).  

He's got the umbrella out, next the jacket goes on.  

This girl seems unusually tall.   

 Eventually the bus came and they all went away.  

Ampelmann

There's a construction site near where I work that has been fenced off for more than a year. I really don't know what they are building.  (I could probably figure it out if I cared... but I don't... there is so much construction going on). 

Last month, they put up a billboard with figures of people walking with city names above the characters.  I thought this was fascinating, and would be fun to try to take pictures of real people walking next to the icon people. 

So, I waited and took some shots.  Most were misses, some were slightly amusing.  It's a tiny bit of timing and mostly luck.  I finally go this picture, which I thought was as good as it could get.  Perfectly centered and her foot position paralleled the figures. 

I posted the picture up on my Flickr account and someone said "Great Ampelmann moment".   I didn't quite know what that meant.  It seemed likely to me that Ampelmann was a famous photographer and the picture might have been in his/her style.  So, I looked him/her up on Wikipedia.  I learned that Ampelmann is not a photographer, but the name of the character figures which are shown in pedestrian crossing lights.  So, each of these figures represents the crossing walk figures that are depicted in each of those cities. 

With this bit of information, I went back to the wall and looked at it from different angles and took more shots.  Here are some other photos of the wall and the people. 

And finally, here is the actual New York Ampelmann up on the cross walk and the sign version, plus a real life ampelmann.