Down trends the neck, up trends the ground...

Get a grip, huh?

Figuring the angles...

In a windowed workroom below street level, a craftsman focuses on the job at hand...

I'd drill, baby, drill...

Recently the utilities company came and opened a gaping square hole in the sidewalk immediately outside NJM's front door. Like, two feet from our front door. For a couple weeks we had to very carefully and gingerly exit the building, in sidesteps, so we didn't fall into the hole. Made coming and going interesting.

As the saying goes, if you love what you do you’ll never work a day in your life. That certainly rang true while working on the March issue of New Jersey Monthly. It’s all about wine—specifically Jersey wines.

The ground-level control panel of the crane that got jammed against the steeple of the Methodist Church in Morristown earlier this month...

It was as if nothing ever happened. Just four days after two workers were rescued from the steeple next door to the New Jersey Monthly offices in Morristown, we returned to work this morning to see a cherry picker once again lifting two workers toward the top of the steeple.

Now, after the Great Steeple Rescue, Plain Sight returns to more traditional subject matter...

Big Brother is watching from his perch on high...

An urban archeologist could read some sense into this...

An empty storefront takes it on the chin...

Never made it out of the delivery truck...

Emerging from the side of a trash can, this bolt got busted...

Bugs Bunny, eat your heart out...

As the 5.8-magnitute earthquake centered in Mineral, Virginia, rippled up and down the eastern seaboard, startling many an unsuspecting Mid-Atlantic resident, Carole King’s famous lyrics played through my head as I did what true New Jerseyans do in times of distress—I ate another slice of pizza.

Where a parking lot and a driveway meet...

Similarly attired aliens face each other in their domed bubble, prior to being fed by humans and dispensing removable white tongues that the humans require.

A Verizon truck's rear deck contains a smattering of useful things, including a pair of mud boots and a whopper of a magnet...

In a park where a Memorial Day ceremony had been held, this mashup was discovered on Tuesday...

Like the bull who saw red and charged, I saw red and stopped in my tracks...

What were these two women pushing? Counterfeit goods? Sisyphus's rock?

With a blood-red door...

Through this portal pass, well, nobody...

The base of a flagpole, from which Old Glory flies...

A parked van offers a window into totes...

What these two golden boys are expecting is the emergence of their master from the Greenberry's Coffee shop on the Green in Morristown...

Leaves rain down on steps after a storm, and so does a potato chips bag...

Have a little found art with your parking lot...

Before the frost bit, but after many of the leaves fell, these flowers popped at a parking lot in Morristown...

A pulldown security door heads for the scrap heap...

The body's largest organ is examined here...

Today, the panorama, the panoptic panoply across the pock-marked pavement...

The sudden arrival of a Ford F-250 with a custom paint job changes the picture...

Or should it be them's the breaks? While you're thinking that over, have a look at the picture...

Who knows? He may be wearing this mini-uniform right now...

Personally, I've always loved the sound of the name, Bristol-Donald, and have seen it on mud flaps of trucks for years. Turns out it's a Newark-based company that makes truck bodies...

A children's art project in the park leads to an enigmatic photograph. Wait. Aren't all Plain Sight photographs enigmatic?

What does it do? Haven't a clue. But the music goes round and round and it comes out here...

His job involves a lot of rocking and rolling of mute beings with tiny, featureless heads and narrow shoulders...

Behind a grocery store, I found a peach basket, shopping carts, railroad tracks...grids gone wild...

A delivery truck pulls up in front of a 24-hour convenience store, and the driver starts unloading...

A kind of urban Rushmore...

A kind of parking lot at a daycare center...

Where several small restaurants failed in succession, the owner of the building finally decided to rip out the storefront facade and start over...

Same window as yesterday, but a different focal length. Result? A different picture...

Well, not literally, but this dress shop window puts me in mind of the spirit of NOLA's Fat Tuesday...

And throw in railroad tracks for good measure...

Think of how much dirt this one holds back...

Behind the scenes at a big butcher shop...

Location: Morristown

Location: Morristown

At a repair garage in Morristown, a truck says "Ahh"...

A peek in the drawer of a Central Power & Light utility truck...

Peering into the guts of a utility truck..isn't that what anyone would do, walking down the street?

I came across a utility truck in Morristown yesterday. The operator was checking voltages in underground cables. I asked him what this big yellow box on the back of his truck was for...

When I checked out Hairspray Tuesday night at the Sun National Bank Center in Trenton, I knew I was in for a great show. I already knew most of the songs (and dance moves), but what I didn’t realize was the number of talented New Jersey cast members who are adding their own style to the Broadway tour.

One of the more elaborate late-lingering Christmas displays seen around is this diorama on the Green in Morristown...

Freezing temperatures stopped water in its tracks, creating a stalactite at the end of a drainpipe.

We've moved on, but not all the decorations have...

Baby, it's cold outside--and inside, too, if you happen to be working on a construction project like the condos on the Green in Morristown. Solution? Pipe in the heat...

It was only a few weeks ago, around Thanksgiving, when winter still seemed a ways away. The wind hadn't yet turned fierce and ripped the last brittle leaves from the trees. It was still possible to step outside under the mid-day sun in shirtsleeves...

The oven at Anthony's Pizza and Pasta on the Green in Morristown can handle eight large pies at once. In other words, it's a biggie. It runs at 550 degrees, and requires some serious ductwork to vent the excess heat...

An oxymoron, sure, but this utility truck did bring to mind a kind of white noise or a representational canvas tilting into geometric abstraction...

Out with the old at a condo development under construction...

The truck in yesterday's picture pulls out of the parking lot, proving once again that still life never sleeps...

This boot was made for walking, and that's just what it did. It stepped into the concrete, left a mark that can't be hid...

Rosie is here with the latest in where NJ chefs are manning the stoves.

I said Tuesday's group of hot rod pictures would be the last. Well, I lied...

We bid a fond farewell to the Morristown hot rod rally with these pictures...

When we left Tony Gaglio yesterday, he had sold his beloved 1951 purple Mercury Monarch, missed it so much he asked the buyer to sell it back to him, and had been turned down flat. Now for the rest of the story...

Tony Gaglio loved his 1951 Mercury. Then, in a moment of weakness, he succumbed to a generous offer for the car, and rashly sold it. He went out and bought a 1949 Merc', and he had a lot of work done on it in an attempt to duplicate the feel of his treasured '51. "But I just couldn't get it the way I wanted it," he says. So then...

Hot rodders are very touchy about certain things, and about their basic convictions wear their hearts on their sleeves, or rather their windows, spare tire covers, and saddle bags.

Details, details. Hot rods are all about the details. Continuing yesterday's coverage of a hot rod rally on the Green in Morristown...

A passel of hot rods, chrome exhaust pipes rumbling, ringed the Morristown Green last week for a show and tell. Plain Sight was there...

Over the weekend, Plain Sight looked up at the elevated entrance to a plumbing supply store. As promised, here is the view from the other side...

I don't have a thing for FedEx trucks, but something about this one caught my eye while the driver was making a delivery...

George Washington was embroiled in conversation with Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette while at their feet a child of the future was taking notes...

I was walking from the parking lot to the office when I noticed, in the middle of the sidewalk, this neat, perfectly round mound with a tiny hole in the middle. It had not been there the day before. Strangely, not an ant in sight...

Anyone recruiting for the U.S. Olympic weightlifting team might want to track this fellow down...

All of us see things every day that we take for granted will look exactly the same tomorrow. But as I like to say, still life never sleeps.

Maybe it's a vestige of boyhood, but I'm a sucker for a backhoe, with its digging tools fore and aft and its cockpit full of levers. And especially so when juxtaposed against something interesting, as here...

A vacant storefront gets a makeover, here in the early stages of the process...

Santa has his sleigh, landscapers have their trailers. It seems, now that it's May, the landscapers make as many stops as Santa does on Christmas Eve. Except reindeer don't create a racket like edgers, leaf blowers, shredders and riding mowers do.

Come to think of it, do reindeer make any noise at all? They would probably trim the grass free of charge, and the way the temperature has been, it's not too warm for them.

Why risk spilling soup on a beautiful pair of boots? Instead, they rest atop a locker in a  restaurant's back room until the employee's shift ends.

Vacant stores are an unfortunate sign of the times as unemployment hits a scary 8.2% in New Jersey...

I keep my camera on the passenger seat of my car just in case I see something at a red light. I often do.

Pictures that require shooting out the driver's window are the easiest. Shooting through the windshield is trickier. Hardest is shooting through the passenger window, as here...

Rarely does a building look as made from the kind of blocks I used to play with as a kid as this one does...

Was Christo in Morristown last week?

When the 11 p.m. local news anchors shared the "Breaking News" that there was an earthquake in Jersey last night, I was actually kind of disappointed.

The NJM editorial staff convened at the Grasshopper off the Green pub, just down the block from our Morristown offices, to witness history and eat lunch.

Last week, before the snow melted, I came across this pickup truck parked in front of one of Morristown's vintage homes. The truck itself, or the gas pumping apparatus on it, was itself kind of vintage.

I've seen them in driveways, but I didn't know quite how those Portable On Demand Storage bins were dropped off and picked up until I found myself behind a PODS truck at a traffic light in Morristown.

Is it fair to shower a man with congratulatory confetti when he is the one who has to clean it up?

A Morristown alley, a brick-and-mortar relic and a new automobile -- perfect together.

Yesterday, Plain Sight looked into the mirror-smooth surface of a concert tour bus parked in Morristown. Today, what I saw when I aimed the camera in the other direction.

Click "read the rest of this post" to see full picture...

The side of this concert tour bus reflected its mirror reflecting the sky and a few down to Earth things as well.

Click "Read the rest of this post" to see full picture.

For me, tarps are all the same yet all different.

This one involves a construction site in Morristown. Construction sites have fascinated me since I was a boy.

Yesterday's Plain Sight left off with a question:

What does the dancing frankfurter Doo-Wop Doggy have in common with the original "Blonde Bombshell," Jean Harlow?

No sequins on his buns, but this dude was definitely rockin' , even if it was one of the wurst Elvis impersonations ever.

At last it can be told--or, rather, it has to be, because I promised no more digressions.

Back on Thursday, I was taking pictures of an interesting truck in a parking lot in Morristown when I heard a stern voice say, "Can I Help You?"

Here, finally, is what happened next...

Yesterday's post was about taking pictures of an interesting truck in Morristown and being halted by the words, "Can I help you?"

That led to a digression about a similar but darker tale--from Jersey City in the early 1980's--of photographing what I realized too late was a Mob hangout. The post grew too long to return to the Morristown incident.

So now, to borrow a phrase from Paul Harvey, a broadcaster whose voice could dramatize the peeling of a banana, here is "The rest of the story..."

WARNING: This post includes a photograph that almost got me arrested.

As a guy who takes pictures wherever he goes--which is to say not on assignment and not by invitation, though also not by trespassing--I hear these words from time to time.

"Can I help you?" is, of course, a polite way of saying, "Who the hell do you think you are taking pictures of my [fill in the blank]?"

I heard them again this morning.

Many of the pictures I've taken over the years are of things that don't move. Landscapes or still lifes. But they do change. Sometimes overnight.

Friday's Plain Sight picture was a case in point.

I park my car in the same Morristown municipal parking lot--10J--every day, and usually in the same spot.

But when I left work and arrived at my car at--just a sec, I'll look up the EXIF information--exactly 6:48:22 p.m., it didn't look the way it usually does.

What could be more American than "We deliver"?

Only what surrounds it in this picture.

Standing today in a spotless room stocked with vital fluids and equipment for delivering them, I had a flashback.

Just five and a half weeks ago, I spent several hours in a strangely similar room, having essential fluids dripped into my body from plastic packs hung from prongs on metal poles just like you see here.

In a Morristown parking lot, an SUV sprouts fangs and sings, "I Am The Walrus."

A Salvadoran restaurant just opened a block from our office. I went there for takeout at lunchtime Wednesday.

Ordered a guanabana shake and a pupusa, which is a Salvadoran tortilla, thicker than a pancake and filled with cheese, which melts as the tortilla is griddled. What to do while waiting?

Look at what's hidden in plain sight, of course.

Waiting for a takeout order is a good time to zone out, read a paper, or, if you're like me, start looking at one's surroundings closely and hopefully. I use the word in the old-fashioned sense. I will never give in on hopefully.

At about 100 paces from our office door, Anthony's Pizza and Pasta is not only the closest food shop to our office, but a good one, making fresh tasty subs. The looking around is also quite good.

Raise your hand if you're against sprawl. Unruly, unchecked, unregulated growth. It's everywhere, it's stubborn, and it's in our face.

But at this time of year we are reminded of another type of sprawl, just as stubborn and in our face.

Bless its heart.

A handsome coffee parlor named Greenberry's opened a few doors from our office on the Morristown Green over the winter. Dark wood panelling, comfy armchairs, friendly baristas, designer chocolates....sound familiar?

The Greenberry's chain started in Virginia in 1992, and Morristown is its first outpost in New Jersey. Their point of distinction seems to be that they don't overroast their coffee like a certain viral franchise we could name.

The photo you see here was not  taken at Greenberry's (heaven forbid), but at its polar opposite, a one-of-a-kind place around the corner called Jersey Boy Bagels.

As you'll see as this photo blog continues, I love pickup trucks. Maybe because they have beds. This one was parked yesterday near our office in Morristown.