St.Petersburg street life - selection of 10 random photo .:. EN/RU

Greetings! This week I've been struggling for two days upgrading my computer, was moving some of the archives to another hard drive, renaming and rearranging folders, all this stuff -- and of course, that pushed me to check some old photos. And since I haven't been out lately and don't have any fresh photos, so... today I'm pleased to present some old photos from 2019. By the time I rarely used .raw file format, and everything you see below is done without fancy raw conversions (but certainly with photoshop and with a pinch of x-processing here and there).

Old and new... Fun fact: did you know that back in the early 20th century there was a profession of horse manure collection, which has now completely died out due to irrelevance? There's really nothing funny about that, that's life... The streets were littered with all kinds of horse droppings for pedestrians to get into, and that's one reason why rubber galoshes (which can easily be washed clean) were so widespread as footwear.

And another fact: it was very common to see nails falling out of horses' shoes on the streets. These artefacts were one of the factors which complicated cycling fun's mainstreaming to the crowds (though not the only one factor). By the way, dung piles can still be found on the streets today, but rarely and only in certain places.

Located in the historic centre of the city, Griffon's bridge is featured in all travel guides, of course it's a favourite spot for taking spectacular selfies. (And a good place to take pictures of the photographers themselves ))))

Theres a lot of things I like about this photo. We see a "palimpsest" here - city officials are painting over the graffiti but nasty personas are once again decorating the walls with their scribbles, i.e. it is not just a dinosaur, but a round of an endless struggle is captured here! The second thing I like here is the unusual colour contrast, no one was trying to achieve colour harmony or opposing/complementary colours from the colour wheel palette, hehe. And thirdly: it's the dinosaur depicted here! It's not often you get to see a dinosaur walking the streets of the city. All joking aside, most importantly: the picture gives the (obscene) impression that I photographed the author himself, who has finished his artwork and is walking away, behind the frame, clutching a spray can in his hand... not really - he's holding a cup of coffee, just a random passerby. But still: the photo is made in a way that gives the viewer that impression, and I like it enormously!