Smoke Break

This photo is a tribute to Dave Beckerman, whose online journal was quite an inspiration to me a few years ago as I was considering getting back into photography.

Dave's journal, in a sense, was the Mother Of All PhotoBlogs - it was in essence a blog before there was such a thing.

Dave is a great B&W photographer and a great street photographer. I never shoot B&W any more and only seldom convert one of my digital images to B&W. But over the past few weeks, as I walk the final block on the way to work before I get to my building, I've been seeing small groups of smokers sitting on the window ledges of the Candler Building along Pratt Street. If I walk very close to the building, I would often just see a few pairs of legs, a hand or two, and puffs of smoke, backlit by the early-moning sun.

Those little scenarios started to strike me as "compositional," and Black-and-White-y. Well, yesterday, I finally snapped a few shots, with B&W in mind as the final product.

I rather like it, and hope you do, too. I'm curious to see what Dave thinks.