streets – The Michael Lam Collection's Blog

Guyana’s Traffic Police

Yesterday there was a traffic-jam at the Regent and Avenue of the Republic intersection (mainly because the minibuses were clogging it up), there was a traffic cop standing on the corner just staring, I mean literally just staring at the glob of non-moving, horn-blowing vehicles at the junction.

It was amazing to me that I came down the road heading south and pulled up at the traffic light (I was now at the head of the queue at the light), there were two vehicles remaining in the line to cross over heading west, as well as several in the lane to my right attempting to turn west. The light being Red I sat and waited assuming that the two vehicles would move along by the time the light showed green.

No such luck! As it turned green, I inched forward (OK, I drove for about three feet) to see what the position was, the car directly in the intersection had about six to eight feet of space in front of him, and the pick-up truck behind him was about five feet behind, I blew my horn to attract his attention (the car driver, that is) and indicated that he should drive forward a bit so that the traffic in my lane could move along between him and the pick-up truck.

Seems sensible, right?

The police officer decided to finally move from his comfortable spot on the side of the road, indicated to me that I should wait, and when the car had driven up, he waved the pick-up truck forward….

…thereby adding to an already clogged intersection. The intelligence of our policemen and their spontaneous decisions never ceases to amaze me.

I really really thought long and hard for a title for this post, and couldn’t come up with a single thing worth using, so here’s three for the weekend…. Three photos, that is; this is a blog about my photographs after all.

The first is a building that I have had my eye on for some time, I seldom ever see it without a few to several vehicles in front of it, and I didn’t want the vehicles in the photograph, at least not this photograph, I wanted the building. Of course getting a nice composition is challenging, especially with the many wires crisscrossing the street in front of the building. Whenever I saw it nice and clear, the lighting would not be optimal, and whenever the lighting was right, the place was very very busy, well I finally saw it clear and with a nice morning light.

It only takes a small rain shower to ensure that pedestrians walk on the roads instead of the pavement, especially on Avenue of the Republic, it probably only rained for about ten minutes the morning I took this, normally I wouldn’t be tempted to take a photograph, but the sun had come out and the colours were popping and it was even evident in the reflections in the water 🙂

Two days ago, Nikhil did a very nice close up shot for his 365 Project, and while I was also captured by the colours of the structures, I decided to wait and see what else about the scene would capture my attention, as it turns out I liked the house and tree more than the structures 🙂 This is also a move away from the norm for me, I usually do proportionate cropping if I crop the image, but in this case I found a square crop to be optimal for the image (that and I really needed to crop out the other buildings on the left without losing some of the elements in the shot)