Obviously it was the bright red lips on this “faceless” mannequin in a store window that caught my attention. It seemed to me that I could get a shot where the mannequin faded into the background and the reflection of the building would make the picture more ambiguous. It wouldn’t, I thought, be immediately obvious what you were looking at. I thought it might look a little surreal with the red lips almost floating in the air. After I took the picture I realized that I’d had a little luck. For some reason the area around the face, lips and neck of the mannequin came out darker than the rest in effect framing the lips.

My wife and I went into New York City yesterday for a retirement party for one of our former colleagues. It was late afternoon of a bright, sunny day and at street level much was in dark shade. A touch of brightness caught my attention. The bright sunlight was hitting the top of a nearby building, which had some colorful rectangles painted on it. There were also some faint vertical lines and cutting across them the more diagonal lines of ropes on one of the platforms that are used to clean windows (and I guess other surfaces as I didn’t see any windows on this side of the building). When I took the picture I thought I would include the platform and the people on it, but ultimately I decided to leave it out and focus on the more abstract look of the colorful rectangles, vertical and diagonal lines.