Watch Out, Pandas!

Watch Out, Pandas!, originally uploaded by Lindsay Beyerstein.

Captured with my camera phone on Smith Street. The tag is stuck to a phone kiosk. I really like my neighborhood.

Which reminds me... Late Monday night I decided to go for a walk. The street was more or less deserted. As I passed the local realtor's office, I heard a really strange sound.

Sort of a "Booo boo booobwaah."

I looked over to see one of New York's finest, in full uniform, transfixed by the huge orange and white cat in the realtor's window. He was leaning over and making baby noises through the glass. Cop and cat locked eyes and gazed adoringly at one another.

Suddenly the police officer realized I was watching and got very embarrassed. I was sorry to interrupt the moment.

Comments

[The Phantom]

Did a search and find this

See last line. Can't figure out if this guy is from Brooklyn or not. He may be the source of the panda mystery.

[aeroman]

Wow, I love how the tones on the sticker look. Is that just something camera phones do? I've never had one.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Thanks, aeroman.

I think the tones in this picture were a lucky accident from Photoshop. My 3-year-old camera phone generally gives me pretty crappy colors. For whatever reason, Photoshop doesn't recognize the color profile of my phone. So, when I open a file in PS, it asks me whether I want to assign a color profile to the picture. (The profile is the set of instructions telling PS how your device "sees" color, so that PS can render the image as your device "intended".)

These pics didn't have an embedded color profile, and for the sake of experimentation, I opted not to assign one. I only adjusted the white point in the pictures to lighten them up a little, but Photoshop made some interesting color interpretations of its own.

[epistemology]

Lindsay: Cop-on-cat-love voyeur. Didn't have your camera at the ready? Give a girl a camera and everyone's fair game. Damn paparazzi.

And congratulations on the article in the New York Press. Corporate graffiti artists; an excellent term. Except for the artist part.

A nice follow up might be to compare the city's overheated response in the 1980's (?) to graffiti to its response in the case of corporate graffiti.

[Amanda Marcotte]

That's just adorable. Picture and story.

[Laura]

Awww, that's the cutest story ever...

[janet]

That's an adorable story about the cop and the cat.

I am pleased to report that one of my daughter's first words is "meow."

[aeroman]

That kind of happy accident is part of what makes photography so fun. In a long-ago previous life (high school) I unexpectedly won a not-tiny national award for a photograph I took and developed. It was a snotty, b&w still shot of a book, but the best parts of it had nothing to do with my own abilities and everything to do with the fact that I discovered a half-busted enlarger that happened to be able to create some weird, trippy gradients through its dysfunction. A few days later, it was fixed, and no one else would have my luck again.