Joe - 100 Strangers: 10/100 by
DiskoJoe, on Flickr
This is stranger number 10 Joe.
Anyone that has been following my project has probably seen that I have been pretty inactive on the stranger hunt for a while now. Last person I met was back in July. The extreme heat wave and grueling 100 degree days have made street photography a nightmare. I barely wanted to leave my house much less walk in direct sunlight packing a bag full of metal lens.
But eventually all waves come to a break and in Houston the fall has finally started to emerge. Its still probably hot by most peoples standards but like heaven to a Texan eager to get out on the street. So when an opening in my schedule made it self available I decided to go meet up with some other photography friends to go shoot some pictures. We met up at a dive bar in Montrose called Catbirds. Nice place with cheap beer.
So we head out and as I'm walking down the street I see that the antique store across the street has little metal sculptures of flying pigs painted all kinds of crazy colors. So instantly I get an idea for a photo and head across the street. After I got the right shot of the little pig sculpture I look up and see these three guys walking down the street. The one closest to me was Joe and I thought his shirt was cool, it says Houston. So I'm thinking what would be cooler then to get a picture of this guy rocking the awesome Houston tee. Plus he was sporting some wood frame raybans too.
So I stop him and ask him where he got his shirt. He told me it was a shop in rice village. Then I ask if I can take his picture for the project. He was cool and says yeah. His friend sports the RunDMC shirt started messing with me saying, "What....I'm not cool enough for you to take my picture?" So I promised to get a shot of all of them together.
As Joe was posing for his picture he told me that him and his friends were about to open their own T-shirt printing business in town. So I told him about one of my friends that is also a printer in town. They had never met. But then I showed him the pictures from the 100 Stranger project on my iPhone. Turns out him and his friends knew stranger number 2 Diem in some relation. I think it was like a cousins friend or something. But this is one of the reasons I love this project. I meet random people on opposite sides of town and they turn out to know each other. The whole thing just comes back full circle. I just love it. I don't know if I mentioned this before but stranger number 7 Sarah turned out to be my friend Brandy's cousin.
Picture was taken with my Sony A200 and Minolta 50mm F1.7. Edited with Photoshop CS4.
This picture is #10 in my 100 strangers project. Find out more about the project and see pictures taken by other photographers at the
100 Strangers Flickr Group page
My 100 Strangers Set
A group picture
bboy pose cross by
DiskoJoe, on Flickr
The flying pig
flying pig by
DiskoJoe, on Flickr