This street shot is all about comparisons and contrasts. Two men wait for a bus, yet each waits in his own way. They wear clothing that defines their personalities and preferences. The man casually leaning on the signage in the foreground stares intently at the street, possibly searching for signs of his bus. His body language reveals a relaxed stance contrasted to an impatient stare. He seems to enjoy the cool morning air -- his clothing is light and purely recreational. The man in the background uses the ledge of a building for support, as well to hold his large bag. He wears a zipped hooded sweatshirt, even while standing in the morning sun. He chooses to recede into the background, while the other figure dominates the foreground. I link the figures by spacing them between a series of vertical thrusts – the background windows, a lamppost and its shadow, and the signage column at the bus stop itself. The scene becomes a symbolic theatre, with the street itself as a horizontal apron, a battered horizontal curb as a riser, the rust colored horizontal sidewalk as the stage, and the lamp, sign, and building as the set.

Street photography can express the symbolic mood of a street as much as its activity, as it does here. Among the residents of this neighborhood in Miami are refugees that fled Castro’s Cuba and settled here more than 50 years ago. Little Havana has become the best-known neighborhood for Cuban exiles in the world. Today, these Cuban refugees and their descendants make up about 60 per cent of Little Havana’s population. The other 40 percent have migrated from Nicaragua, Honduras and other Central American countries. Many know little of US history, and this “Cafeteria” uses its wall to display the historical origins of political freedom in the United States. The late afternoon light brings out the vivid colors of the building itself, the blue stools set up for outdoor dining, and the colorful folk art illustrations that accompany these history lessons. I waited for a man to cross my path -- he is not the subject of the picture, but does provide an important foreground figure to draw the eye into this layered image.

Even the walls are covered with jewels on Rodeo Drive, perhaps the most upscale shopping street in the Los Angeles area. The incongruously oversized rings, bracelets and necklaces painted on the side of a jewelry store, dwarf a pair of pedestrians pushing a baby carriage and another couple standing on the street corner waiting for their friends or perhaps considering their next purchase. The contrast between the people and the scale of the jewelry depicted on the wall is deliberately shocking and lavish. Every urban street marches to its own beat – on Rodeo Drive, that pulse is measured in dollars and cents. I feast on richly displayed primary colors, and every one of them and more are featured in this image.

The incongruous abstract close-up of a woman eating sushi, filling a row of doors at the entrance to a bright red building, provides a huge contrast in scale when played against the two small boys standing before it. The red building seems to be a sushi restaurant – silver shafts of oversized bamboo tubing complete the décor here. When one of the boys pointed to something in the distance, it was obvious that they are not on Hollywood Boulevard for the sushi. Yet his pointing arm still echoes the horizontal thrust of the black chopsticks feeding sushi into those huge red lips. The two silver railings echo the color of the bamboo decorations, and also repeat the horizontal rhythms of the arm and the chopsticks. The boys wear yellow and blue clothing, adding two additional primary colors to the red in the lips and building. These vivid colors, huge scale contrasts, and rhythmic repetitions, as well as the incongruous nature of the photo on the restaurant door, combine here to make this an expressive street photograph. We are left to wonder what these children must think of this scene, and what seems to be beckoning them from afar.

Street photography often focuses on the nature of a time and a place, and those who may inhabit both. This example of street photography offers a fleeting glimpse of Hollywood lifestyle in 2012. The flamboyant script nameplate of a trendy Hollywood club offers an appropriate backdrop for a pedestrian who seems quite at home with the local lifestyle. Clad in blacks and greys, with stylish blonde hair cascading over back, and clutching the mandatory electronics in her hand, she represents the glitz and glamour of this place as she seems to glide through space through a zone that is all her own.

I use a 400mm telephoto lens to optically shorten the long uphill slope of Merchants Street that rises towards Valletta’s 16th century Fort of St. James Cavalier. By compressing many blocks into one, I make the crowds that throng the streets upscale shops seem even larger than they are. I add three additional contextual dimensions to this image – a large clock advertising a fashion designer, a mass of metal holiday decorations, and a statue of Paul Boffa, Malta’s first prime minister following its independence from Britain. Such context speaks of the nature of the street, the season, and the country.