You begin to notice something unusual about these memorials...photographs of the deceased...

In a 400-year-old churchyard in the Appenine Mountains in northern Italy. Only a dozen spaces remaining...

Vintage, lovingly used. Note the wear on the hand wheel at right...

No longer fully operative, but a piece of the farmhouse history...

If you've been following this Plain Sight series on northern Italy, you know how much my son and I owe to our wonderful hosts in the Appenine Mountains...

This picture is not for the faint of heart...

This enthusiastic gentleman, a manager of the plant, gave us a tour and tasting of the salumificio, a place where the pig is transformed into delicious foodstuffs from nose to tail...

They're called ciccoli (if I'm spelling it right) and they're crunchy and porky and utterly fabulous...

Ever wonder how those casings get filled?

I've described the Parmigano-Reggiano factory we visited as being in the Appenine Mountains of northern Italy. But what do the Appenines look like? Here is a dramatic example...

Neither had I. It may not be available over here. It may not be widely available even in Italy. But it exists. I saw it...

Most Parmigiano-Reggiano is aged two to three years, but the factory keeps some around much longer, just to see how it ages...

During their maturation, wheels of Parmigiano-Reggiano are inspected by sticklers who use a light steel mallet (as demonstrated by a manager of the Santa Lucia Caseificio) to probe the interior of the wheel for faults...

Here, in the storage rooms, is where Parmigiano-Reggiano really becomes what the Italians call "the king of cheeses." They stay here for years...

Life began in the ocean then slithered onto dry land. Parmigiano-Reggiano kind of recapitulates that journey...

If you've ever seen an entire wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano you know its distinctive stamps, which include not only the words Parmigiano-Reggiano all around the circumference, but the month and year of making, and numbers that signifiy at which caseificio it was made. Here's how that is done...

No, that's not a perfect rhyme, but what do you expect for free? Now as to the subject of today's picture, you'll just have to click if you want to unstick the mystery...

Transferring the curds--a roughly 80-pound ball--from the vats to the round storage forms in which they will become wheels of Parmigiano-Reggiano...

For some reason, one of the curd spheres came up huge and had to be sliced in two--that's all in a day's work at the Parmigiano-Reggiano factory, but big excitement for spectator me...

After the curd is gathered, it is tied to a crossbar before being removed from the sea of whey. It is on its way, or whey, to becoming Parmigiano-Reggiano...

The first step of making Parmigiano-Reggiano is all about teamwork...

Like a kind of sunrise, the globe of nascent cheese emerges from the blonde sea of whey...

In the village of Santa Lucia, in the mountains above Modena, Italy, they make Parmigiano-Reggiano, every day, and the process starts with vats the size of Jacuzzis...

Some bikes are just quietly, strangely beautiful...

Lunch at Enoteca Italiana in Bologna, a wine and liquor store and deli rolled into one...

At Enoteca Italiana, where the stylish Bolognesi get their lunchtime sandwiches, wine and espresso...

Step this way for a fond final look at the bountiful fruit, flower and produce market of Modena, Italy...

This shopper never gets to the front of the line, but only in Italy do vegetables and fruit rub shoulders with statuary...

You hear a lot about how beautiful the produce markets are in italy. And then you see one, and you understand...

A construction project impinges on a public square in Modena, Italy...

But this one, inside the Verdi Suite of the Hotel Grand Majestic gia Baglioni in Bologna, intrigued me...

Atop the cathedral of San Pietro in Bologna...

We spent a few days in the Apennine Mountains, about 30 miles south of Bologna...

In Bologna on weekend evenings during the holidays, the streets at the center of town become pedestrian malls and the shops stay open late...

Modena, near Bologna, Italy, is where the real balsamic vinegar--aceto balsamico tradizionale--comes from. Modena is a sweet town, old and mellow yet tangy, not unlike the unctuous sauce the vinegar becomes as it ages...

It comes from Bologna, hence our (derogatory) name for it, but the stuff that the Bolognesi are rightly so proud of is one of the jewels in their culinary heritage of working miracles with every inch of the pig...

Only the Italians could come up with a public fountain as unabashed as this...

Imagine Times Square as a pedestrian mall with traffic allowed only on the periphery, and not at all on weekends, and you have the heart of Bologna, Piazza Maggiore...

From Ol' Blue Eyes Drive in Hoboken

Seasick at the front lawn...

Near the Holland Tunnel into NYC...

Only the sign remains of one of Hoboken's great eateries, where etiquette demanded that you throw your clamshells on the tile floor...

Stacked by the right-of-way...

The raw materials stand at the ready...

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

Where no one dare tread, the bow of the ship...

At the dock at Ellis Island, after a party at the renovated terminal...

Ten days after the storm, downed branches are still piled on curbs like fortress walls...

Every night I park my car under a pine tree...

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

A Sunday afternoon at Lake Arrowhead, gifted with a souvenir of Tropical Storm Irene...

Definitely not mine, but maybe you have a place at Arrowhead Lake?

Into a lake lush with lily pads...

High and dry and upside down...

A lazy Sunday afternoon at Lake Arrowhead...

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...

This Jet is full of nothing but hot air, like (at the moment) his flesh-and-blood teammates and their coach...

Never made it out of the delivery truck...

Perhaps if there were greater demand, matters could be reversed, but not without incurring certain inflation.

Snazzy wheels await the return of their adolescent jockeys...

I see this as an operating theater where all the equipment and the attendants and the patient, on its back, are ready for the surgeon to come in, gloved hands held aloft...

In which the rake has abandoned his loyal owner and has fallen madly in love with a chain-link fence. The evil front steps, which have engineered the whole thing, snicker in the background. Oh foolish rake!

When the rains come (when don't they come?), it's a little misaligned...

Before it was sheathed in plywood and insulation board, people passed through this doorway to do their banking...

With dual cones on duty...

You'd know it anywhere, haze be damned...

It's magnificent, in a way, one of a kind...

Trash cans and riotous vegetation cozy up in harmonious colors...

You have plenty of time to stare at this button while waiting for a response from inside...

On a gray day, a permanently windswept anetenna...

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

When you are directed to rinse, you reach for the pink cup. The dentist also has a pink cup on her instrument tray...

Maybe someday nuclear fusion will take place in devices no bigger than this...

The cyclops of the dentist's office shows its true colors...

Pure and intense, but more directional...

The two young men who toil on deck relax on the way back to port at Viking Village.

Unused on this trip was this big bad buoy, but it has an important role...

You can never have too much rope on a boat. Meanwhile, in the wheelhouse, radar and sonar screens and other equipment scan the ocean bottom, watch the weather, keep track of other boats, avoid undersea wrecks and allow Capt. Chris LaRocca to tuck sagacious pinches of Skoal behind his lip...

In the wheelhouse, Capt. Chris LaRocca has all the essentials in close array...

With 459 pounds of cleaned scallops on board, the Lucky Thirteen heads back to Viking Village at Barnegat Light on Long Beach Island. This would prove to be the last day of nice weather before Irene made the scene.

The first tow across the ocean bottom yielded 70 bushels of unshelled scallops. Now came the small-bore part of the job, the cleaning...

The dredge contents are dumped on the deck of the boat, and the deckhands begin flipping through the pile, sifting out scallops...

This contraption, that looks like a giant bedspring/art project, is dragged across the ocean floor, arresting scallops from their peaceful, filter-feeding, bottom-snoozing existence...

Fifty miles off the coast of Long Beach Island, the scallop boat Lucky Thirteen prepares for a day of fishing...

Alone with a cell phone while the clothes go 'round...

Bugs Bunny, eat your heart out...

Not the middle of nowhere; maybe the edge of nowhere...

She doesn't suffer for beauty, but the narrow creek (nature's storm drain) way below her is not exactly beautiful or bountiful...

These flowers don't want to be watered, they want to be firewatered...

It looks like an amusement park for cars...

...watching others work. The crew boss at a car wash (the guy who handles the cash register) watches the crew swarm over the wet car with thick towels...

The hose knows where it goes...

And there's nothing you can do about it...

This little fella snoozes, a laidback sentinel, above his pals the Marvel Heroes and the Glow Crosses...

All in a lather, my car inches through the wash cycle, barely recognizable...

Four high school girls take a straw poll outside a 7-Eleven.

At a car wash in Montclair....

Through this portal pass ordinary suburbanites, though perhaps with titled aspirations...

Flowers bloom above an in-ground garbage receptacle. Not as gross as it sounds. Kind of beautiful, actually...

Yes, it's a lot smaller than a dumpster, but it's one heck of a lot bigger than any garbage bag you've ever seen...

This brushy marshland spreads for miles in all directions on Kiawah Island, South Carolina, interrupted by occasional, minimally disruptive patches of development...

Also known as Two Characters in Search of a Drink...

An outdoor whirlpool gets pelted under a gathering sky...

An unidentified box on a custodial door at an office building in Teaneck...

Bringing a load of whites to the laundry takes on new meaning when the sheets are this big. I wouldn't want to be the guy who has to fold the pleats.

A rainy morning in a banquet tent on Kiawah Island off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina...

Where a parking lot and a driveway meet...

These have taken it on the chin...

There are window displays, carefully constructed, and then there is this...

On a hot sunny day on Halsey Street in Newark, two people share a slice of shade...

Part Pac-Man, part rearing horse, part pentangle...

All things considered, a busy intersection...

It responds not only to dots and dashes but curves and diagonals...

Where tank trucks refill, headed for home furnaces. Probably fairly quiet there this time of year.

Is there anything quieter than an epty, fogged-out softball field?

Picnic benches in the mist...

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.

Outside what appeared to be a pre-school on Halsey Street in Newark

What would be on this particular bucket's list? Well, for sure, stop at all railroad crossings...

At the intersection of I-80 and I-280 in Parsippany...

Where I-80 and I-280 merge in Parsippany, there is a small, benign version of the Bermuda Triangle...

There's no question of lassoing steers, but maybe telephone poles...

Where I-280 flows into I-80, amid riotous greenery, a reflector attaches to a guard rail like a Post-it note on a page...

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

An empty stroller in an unlikely location begs a question...

Outside what appears to be a pre-school on Halsey Street in Newark...

A Hoover for cleaning out old oil tanks and stuff like that.

I passed this gated entry on one of my walks in Berlin. Couldn't see anything beyond the gate but a grassy courtyard....

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

Simple bicycles like these are ubiquitous in Berlin (though not quite as ubiquitous as in Amsterdam). What stopped me in front of this one was the combination of muted, pastel colors in the bike and in the wall it's leaning against.

And an audience of big wheels...

In a fortress of an old commercial building in Jersey City...

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?

Spring has had so little spring in its step we seem not that far from scenes like these, just two months ago...

Tree topples, limbs must be amputated, tilted stump remains...

Through a glass darkly...

Almost 40 years ago, this sprawling mansion was a convalescent home for women. My own mother-in-law recuperated from cancer surgery there. Then the castle was bought by the King of Morocco. Now it is in the early stages of being converted to a luxury resort.

Is it oxidation or something else that turns the marble this color?

Rush hour, Berlin, on board the U-2 subway line. An interesting thing about the Berlin subway (U-Bahn) is that there are no turnstiles. There are ticket machines on the platform. Guess what keeps people from simply riding for free.

At Liberty Landing Marina at Liberty State Park in Jersey City, she faces the elements unprotected while on both sides her marina-mates are weather-proofed.

It was just a few weeks ago, before the trees began to bloom, when I came across this marina in Jersey City...

How appropriate that this shark should be within view of the sharks of Goldman, Sachs, their Jersey City tower rising in the background.

Instead of making waves, the Beast in early spring is shading dandelions under its belly...

Where are we? In the subway (U-Bahn) in Berlin, waiting for a train...

Where huddled masses of metal yearn to breathe free...

A bush outgrows its pot, by a lot.

Where cars come out clean...

The tulip tree sheds its long, soft, sensuous petals and welcomes spring undressed, making a bed of the ground below it...

A broken fence, where rain courses through, begins to dry out...

Yesterday, I criticized the memorial as too abstract, but its abstractness does suggest a metaphor that is intriguing and disturbing...

You know what's wrong with the Berlin memorial? It's fun. I'll explain...

Built on former no-man's land separating East and West Berlin, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe stands roughly between the Brandenburg Gate and the site of Hitler's bunker. It was designed by American architect Peter Eisenmann and consists of 2,711 stone steles, or slabs, of varying height.

Street repair is a common sight in Berlin, and so are pedestrians calmly making their way around it...

This photo proves that I don't just wander around obscure parts of town but also take in some of the famous sights...

The broad avenue known as Unter den Linden in central Berlin is the equivalent of Manhattan's Park Avenue, only much broader, with broader sidewalks, too. Berlin is spacious, and it doesn't have the skyscrapers that make canyons of midtown Manhattan streets.

A literal "kindergarten"--children's garden--grows in the Prenzlauer Berg section of Berlin among the blocky apartment buildings. It's about 5:30-6 pm, and I like how this one father, still in his business suit, kneels down to play with his kleine kinder.

As the U-Bahn, or subway, leaves central Berlin (Mitte) for Prenzlauer Berg and other former East Berlin neighborhoods, it rises from underground to elevated tracks along the avenue known as Schönhauser Allee...

We're used to seeing these photo booths on the Jersey Shore, where people are already frolicking. But in Berlin you see them in seemingly random spots around town. Most curious...

I didn't see many black faces while I was in Berlin. I did see one gathering of young black people at the Brandenburg Gate, and it was a strange one. They were demonstrating in support of the electorally defeated Ivory Coast strongman Laurent Gbagbo, chanting and holding up signs that read, in German, "Gbagbo is the only correct/legitimate president of Ivory Coast." This was while Gbagbo was still holed up in his home, before his arrest.

In Berlin's former Soviet sector, some otherwise drab apartment buildings invite artists to create street-level murals...

As in Amsterdam, a lot of people get around Berlin on bicycles...

Leave it to New Jersey. The only place where there is still a West Berlin and an East Berlin is right here, in Camden County. I am just back from a few days vacation in the original Berlin, the one that was mostly rubble in 1945 and is now famously unified and revivified.

See you Monday, April 11th. Meanwhile, here's a parting shot...

A seafood delivery truck behind a restaurant...

By the side of Route 280 West, in Parsippany...

What we need is more sunshine this spring, less white precip...

It was a Sunday...

My 91-year-old mother made fast work of a beautiful fruit tart.

Yesterday, someone left this pair of gloves on their dashboard. Today, the first day of spring, those gloves are probably wrapped around one of those ice-and-snow brushes, clearing the windshield.

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...

The entrance to the roasting and packaging plant of Oren's Daily Roast, the premium coffee company, in Jersey City...

Along a corridor, in the 4700 wing of St. Barnabus in Livingston...

At a wedding shower in New Brunswick...

Weathered, with a bright and shiny padlock and a memorable context...

Another view of the dumpster door, this time as a monumental installation...

This embankment has been in the works for years. Some day, perhaps soon, it will funnel traffic to the Holland Tunnel...

A case of lime disease?

The superfluity of an air conditioner in February...

Garbage in, art out...

The front door of Diner in Williamsburg, Brooklyn...

Chic dilapidation may be a prerequisite...

Happy young couples, in lumberjack plaid, at Diner in Williamsburg, Brooklyn...

A look inside Diner in Williamsburg, Brooklyn...

I have to admit, it's not in New Jersey. It's in Brooklyn...

The Heubels hang their hats in Beach Haven, Long Beach Island...

More amazing found art...

Sometimes, for no apparent reason, autofocus doesn't work quite right...

A golden sheaf on dirty snow...

At Precision Motors in Caldwell...

At the dentist's office...

At the dentist's office...

At the dentist's office...

Even when the snow melts, the mess remains...

An alley near the docks, Nassau, Bahamas...

This snout-hearted citizen hams it up for NJ. Oink if you love the Garden State.

Near the docks in Nassau, the Bahamas...

Relief available near the piers of Nassau, Bahamas...

Where the cruise ships queue, in Nassau, the Bahamas...

Checking out the boats and the people, quayside at Nassau, the Bahamas.,,

Selling shells dockside, Nassau, Bahamas...

Not here, but in the Bahamas, dockside in Nassau...

The naked lady relaxes with her stuffed cronies as the new year approaches...

No, I'm not talking about myself, I'm talking about the tree next to the walkway behind our house.

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

It's even more striking in retrospect, now that winter is upon us, than it was at the time, and it stood out then...

In the bed of a pickup in Bernardsville...

Pigs love acorns, and in Bernardsville, Dr. Erno Hollo's three 300-pounders feasted for months on this cache, here almost depleted...

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...

Construction underway in a parking deck at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in New Brunswick...

Walking on them tickles the toes...

In a parking garage in New Brunswick...

Don't shoot (the camera) till you see the whites of their eyes...

In the window of a beauty supply store...

In a drugstore window in New Brunswick...

Can't get around the spread-out campus of Rutgers New Brunswick without one of these...

In the port of Nassau, big cruise ships and a lone construction worker...

Holding hands in Nassau, where it's anything but ice cold...

A crane contraption on the sidewalk, and no charge for admission...

Another tribute to my long-time buddy, Roscoe (1993-2010), found while searching through the Plain Sight archives...

A cobbler carries on while all around him undergoes a makeover...

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

A young saleswoman waits for something to do...

Any botanists out there?

I had to say goodbye to my buddy Roscoe this morning. He was 17 and a half years old--80 something in human years--and his health had been failing for awhile. We shan't see his like again. Why does an affected line like that occur to me? Probably a way to mask emotion...

It just isn't possible...

When you could sit outside in a white metal lawn chair, and bask in the last balmy strands of summer...

They keep the system functioning...

To figure this one out, you'l just have to look at the picture...

At Sickles Market in Little Silver, the outdoors gets a sweep...

An environmental installation starring a flattened traffic cone...

The back of a landscaper's truck becomes an inadvertent art installation...

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

Waiting for a construction worker...

Have you ever stared into the maw of a recycling truck?

Nowadays this place is called Dakshin Express, but it's still my go-to for delicious, crispy-tacky, folded, papery, hanging-over-the-plate Indian dosas...

And a fifth wheel too, as the truckers call it...

At a carnival, pizza on the go from an old-fashioned dome-shaped oven...

This kind of strawberry is even more seasonal than the edible kind...

It's 93 octane, but is it any different from automobile gasoline? In any event, it's fun to say marine gasoline.

...yet remain useful.

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

And forgive us our trespasses...

A welded mechanical marvel of the old school. But Do Not Rock Seat!

The mechanical age survives at a carnival...

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...

Last look at the twinned tints, this time with an orange intruder...

Once upon a time a place to stay was here, by the shores of Lake Hopatcong...

Yet another take on the tale of two turquoises...

A chromatic confluence at the Shop-Rite in West Orange...

Telephone poles, traffic cones, construction, intersections, and the punctuation of mall landscaping, let's celebrate it...

Those were the days, which seem so distant now, when you needed a badge to walk on the beach...

The impromptu sports of summer don't get any better--for participants or spectators--than beach volleyball...

A pickup truck and a wall have something in common, as like attracts like...

Chairs set up for a beach wedding in Long Branch...

Kiddie pools covered, boats on dry land, the times they are a changin'...

Water towers dominate the skyline, telling you where you are on the island...

The contrast of sun and shade, evergreen foliage and sky, and a burgundy sedan in the middle...

Entering the clean, minimalist enclave of a Long Beach Island home...

A private world of ornamental foliage, trash cans, and fences...

A boat out of water on tripod legs,,,

A no man's land...

It crosses a great river that New Jersey borders...

Perhaps not many kids his age (18 going on 19) have heard of Art Blakey and Buddy Rich, but Dean Martin Pyzik admires the drumming of both, along with that of Tré Cool of Green Day...

Set up on the Asbury Park boardwalk opposite the Stony Pony, this young drummer was playing some fascinating rhythm, not just the usual thudding. Turns out he is a 2010 graduate of Neptune High School, a member of the National Honor Society, and a drum instructor at Big Beat studio in Neptune City...

Don't miss today's wide-angle, big-picture, contextually complete conclusion of this exciting series...

In a playground along the Hudson River...

In the middle of a playground by the Hudson River...

Soccer nets...

And looks like this...

Standing on the Boardwalk, the back of the A.C. Convention Center is quite a sight. With all the black marks or holes in the wall, it looks like a giant abacus, or perhaps a secular version of the Wailing Wall of Jerusalem. Many of those stumbling out of the casinos after hours at the gambling tables are ready for some wailing...

Well. Trump Plaza has emerged from bankruptcy, is now seeking a name-brand partner to upgrade the casino and hotel. Meanwhile, the Convention Center hulks on...

This picture, taken from the Atlantic City Boardwalk near the Caesar's Pier Shops, shows that redevelopment still has a way to go...

Abbreviated mannequins model their wares in a window of opportunity...

Enter into the mystery...

Luxuriant foliage while waiting to pick up a pair of eyeglasses...

Interesting to find that question asked next to a gas station...

Never underestimate the power of an anticlimax...

Much to look at while waiting to make one's purchases at the big gown sale in the Meadowlands...

A friend asked me, what were you doing at a gown and accessory mega-sale in the Meadowlands? I explained the answer in Plain Sight last week. But now here is the visual evidence...

A young saleswoman waited for something to do...

If you can't find a tiara here, you just don't have any princess in you...

So many choices, so little time...

At the two-day gown sale in Secaucus, a lot of dresses came with elegant cabooses. Here is one...

A conference room at a Hampton Inn in Secaucus is converted to a clearance sale for formal gowns. Up to 75% off, and (in this part of the room) any color you want, as long as its white...

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...

Can only mean one thing--we're at the car wash...

Winter enclosure panels, removed for summer, congregate outside a restaurant...

Under droopy branches, a low-to-the-ground public telephone awaits discovery next to a Chinese restaurant...

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

If sheets of glass could feel, these would be crying...

Behind a strip mall, an odd structure seemingly dedicated to cleanliness falls into disrepair...

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...

The hoop takes a charging foul from a player going to the basket...

Now that the weather is hot all the time, it's hard to remember that transitional time when spring was struggling to emerge from winter, but here is a glimpse of it...

A yacht awaits its annual immersion...

Hundred-degree days seemed a long way off in May, when these teens took a walk on the beach while elders snoozed...

Here's looking at you, kid...

In these wooden palettes, Al Santillo proofs the dough that rises to become the basis for his terrific pizza...

Some will recognize the title of today's post, borrowed from the title of a great early collection of John McPhee's shorter pieces, including one in which he harvests onions and digs one out of the ground, wipes off the dirt and bites into it like an apple. And it tastes good. Anyway, no onions or apples in today's Plain Sight, just a beautiful, old-fashioned set of scales, dusted with a great pizzamaker's flour.

Stopped in at Santillo's Brick Oven Pizza in Elizabeth recently for the killer pie Al Santillo calls the Grandpa, which is a big crunchy square pie loaded with the works...

Two extremes of four-wheeled transportation on either side of a fence...

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

There was a week when the tulip trees shed their lush blossoms, strewing sidewalks with an increasingly slippery pink carpet...

It's interesting how the quality of your waiting changes after you've been sprung from the waiting room and are now in the examining room, though still waiting...

On the Philadelphia side of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge over the Delaware River...

The flag proudly waves as underpinnings erode...

As Homer Simpson might say, "Mmmmm, baaaaked goooods!"

Mastoris, the famous diner in Bordentown, is known for its massive menu, but the place itself is massive...

People ask me if I ever set up pictures. The answer is that the world sets them up for me...

Time ticks slowly, like an IV drip, in the doctor's waiting room...

Before dawn, from a hotel window on the Philadelphia side of the Delaware River, the view of New Jersey and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge...

At a worker's station in a doctor's office, a glimpse of the future...

Out of the viaduct, on the down ramp toward the Holland Tunnel, the tops of buildings float by...

The viaduct (or, as the Marx Brothers said, "Why a duck?") emerges into the open, and there, looming in brick and mortar, is a sign of civilization...

Further into the Holland Tunnel viaduct in Jersey City, daylight breaks in on either side of a dark, massive beam...

Into the viaduct, under the weathered steel beams, the next gallery of the site specific installation...

A four-wheeled spectator enters the gallery of abstract art and slab sculpture...

Finally, traffic at the Holland Tunnel begins to move and the wall tapers down and traffic coming in the opposite direction heaves into view...

Primtiive modern or modern primitive? A wall dividing eastbound from westbound traffic near the approach to the Holland Tunnel...

One thing to be said for getting stuck in rush hour traffic at the Holland Tunnel, heading into New York City. You have plenty of time to study your surroundings, and some of what you see, especially in the viaduct, is striking...

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

These short loins of beef are dry-aging at DeBragga & Spitler for the primo New York restaurant Picholine. A Texan turned Jerseyan, George Faison, is chief operating officer of DeBragga. Read on for a primer on dry-aging...

In the refrigerated storerooms of DeBragga & Spitler, 30-pound short loins of prime beef sleep amid big electric fans, slowly becoming dry-aged steaks.

The loading dock at DeBragga & Spitler, one of the leading purveyors of high-quality beef in NYC and northern New Jersey. One of the two managing partners, George Faison, lives in New Jersey...

From the High Line--the former elevated railroad in Manhattan now converted into a public park--one can see the West 20's and, across the Hudson River, Union City and Weehawken...

It's there to protect the brick if a truck backs into it...

A derelict commercial building facing the Hudson River becomes a visual riot...

On Wall Street, surrounded by Masters of the Universe, a Verizon worker pauses before scuttling down a manhole into the underworld...

A kind of urban Rushmore...

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

Through these portals pass...

The downbeating sun does things to you that can be remedied here...

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

This boy doesn't fetch, but he does a pretty good imitation of Nipper, the RCA dog (I'm dating myself) while lifting his nose to the ocean just across the street from this rooming house in Cape May...

But at the sweet shop across the street from the Congress Hall Hotel in Cape May you can only buy the edible kind...

Well, yes, the phone has push-buttons, but the booth itself is of the type Superman might once have changed in...

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...

As the first buds of spring burst forth, cars filled up before the clouds unloaded...

In front of CulinAriane restaurant in Montclair (one of NJM's Top 25 in the state), two inanimate members of the staff seem poised for a minuet...

And throw in railroad tracks for good measure...

I was driving down a lovely country road in Hunterdon County a few weeks back, and came across this bucolic scene...

Watching the river flow by, or at least the grass grow next to the river...

On the banks of the Delaware River, at Frenchtown, instruments performing tasks inscrutable to the layman. Anybody know what this equipment does?

Before you cross this bridge over the Delaware, you've got some reading to do...

The inviting beverage menu at the Bridge Cafe in Frenchtown, on the Delaware River...

He's always pleasant, and you never have to tip him...

Hint: It's only a matter of time before you figure it out. Location: A luncheonette in Frenchtown.

The scene at The Pancake House in West Caldwell, where tables, especially on Sunday morning, are at a premium...

A conversation between three parked cars and a weird tree trunk, with an audience of houses and a garage, lighting by the sun...

Outside the McHugh contracting company in Montclair, where sculptures are produced and sold as well as utilitarian projects taken on...

A vanishing breed, the neighborhood barber shop, and a welcome sight...

Baby, it's sprngtime, suddenly, as evidenced by this winter jacket thrown over a fence at a playground...

This bundled silvery cloth, gorgeous in itself, is used to reflect excess sunlight from the roofs of greenhouses at the farm of the Chili Goddess, Janie Lamson, in Rosemont, Hunterdon County. The dogs go with the property...

These greenhouses, used by the "Chili Goddess" to shepherd pepper and other seedlings through the winter, shimmer...

I had the pleasure of meeting a dog recently who could play cornerback in the NFL, even though his ball of choice is a basketball. This dog, Jack, who lives on a chile pepper farm in Hunterdon County, likes to chase after a kicked basketball--the harder it is kicked, the better--and bring it back, all in the blink of an eye...

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

The only things moving fast were the raindrops, pelting the cars at a standstill. Meanwhile, on the side of the road...

Intersect three interstates plus US Route 46, add bad weather and rush hour traffic, and you have more than a suggestion of congestion...

Neatly wrapped, carefully placed. What could it be?

A rusted hunk of metal with bolts in it, spotted while stuck in traffic, going nowhere...

Look, through the thickets, are those cars--on Route 80--actually, um, moving?

Going nowhere at the intersection of 80, 280 and 287. Plenty of time to roll down the window and look around...

But now I was abreast of the King of Trucks, a Peterbilt (though those are fighting words to them that believe Kenworth is the King of Trucks. Me? I like 'em both.)

Full title: "Stupid, Pointless, Pathetic Pictures Taken While Bored Silly, Stuck in Traffic"...

A UPS Store, hand trucks at the ready...

Spotted behind a booth at a pizzeria...

Emptying out a restaurant, piling up the remains of the day...

She's sitting on top of the world, or at least a light fixture...

At Anthony's Pizza and Pasta, if you get the right table, you have the best of both worlds...

This picture is about what you can't see...

While "UPSy-Daisy" makes very little sense, I trust the picture will...

Plenty of both in this unlikely juxtaposition...

Well, not diving, exactly, but peeking over the edge outside a restaurant being gutted...

Emptying out a restaurant turns up all manner of quotidian supplies...

Is it a weathervane, a propeller, a lazy Susan, a cable reel, a rotary shovel, a Swiss Army knife, a blender, a high-tech nutcracker, a Roto-Rooter, or a satellite dish?

In case of fire or other emergencies, including being tapped out, this alcove is the place to be...

A few minutes after these pictures were taken, cross-country skiers came schussing down the beach...

The sun barely penetrates the clouds, the parking meters are buried in snow, and the pavement shines...

In the snow, at the Congress Hall Hotel in Cape May...

With Cape May blanketed, this sign brought on shivers and chuckles...

Facing the beach in Cape May...

People in Cape May were saying they hadn't seen so much snow "since...ever!" Cross-country skiers were spotted schussing across the beach. Mounds of plowed snow reached six, seven feet in the air. Yet the mood was warm, because people who braved the white expanses were there to celebrate Valentine's Day, come what may...

Behind the scenes at a big butcher shop...

Location: Morristown

Location: Morristown

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

Location: Princeton University campus...

By the side of Route 206, near Belle Mead...

On the Princeton University campus, even the manhole covers have a pedigree...

An old-fashioned sign directed patrons to the rest rooms at this French restaurant...

My sister-in-law was sitting in the lounge chair beside her hospital bed, waiting to be released, and we were talking about her recuperation when I looked down...

Lest there be any confusion during surgery, someone comes beforehand to mark the patient's hand to indicate on which side of the body the procedure is to be performed...

From the tailor's driver seat, two headless figures form her offensive line...

Photographer Emmet Gowin, who retired from the Princeton University faculty last month after 36 years teaching photography, trained and inspired many students, so it's fitting that some of their work forms a tribute to him in the current exhibit at the Princeton University Art Museum, "Emmet Gowin: A Collective Portrait."

Tailor shop windows, busy working environments, are theaters of the hyper-particular...

A telephone pole on a flatbed by the side of Route 206 near Belle Mead...

There are kisses and there are kisses. That photographs can be kisses is not an obvious idea, but you could imagine a list of ways that could get long before it came to the type of kiss embodied in the life and work of Emmet Gowin, who is retiring from Princeton University after 36 years of teaching photography and is the subject of a retrospective show at the Princeton University Art Museum through February 21.

The holidays linger in Palmer Square in Princeton...

Speared by a red vertical, against a white wall, blue barrels...

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...

The tailor sits here...

No heavy lifting today, as compared to the last two days of PS. Just a view of a tailor's shop I happen to frequent...

I'm worried that something I said in yesterday's Plain Sight might spread bad writing rather than make it easier for people to write well. I'd like to qualify my remark...

The Dave Eggers-like title of today's Plain Sight in fact comes from an even more famous writer from a century ago, Marcel Proust, on the subject of writer's block. What does that have to do with photography and today's photo? Nothing, but I happen to be reading "Swann's Way" and came across this funny quote...

A fringe of ice silences this teapot, which clearly could not stand the heat and got out of the kitchen...

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...

White-collar collars of all colors, a community's collective answer to the question, which shirt today?

There was very little peace, and what there was of prosperity was deep but obscenely narrow. So we march on, determined to get into shape (see this month's cover story!) for the age of full-body scanners...

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...

The Hudson and the East. Traversing both and continuing into the Midwood section of Brooklyn (a largely Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, ironically) brings you to one of the most famous pizzerias in New York, Di Fara. A definite schlep, but worth it...

Or, behold the bread! For pizza this good is indeed the staff of life...

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 TNT Ramblers--an acoustic rock, folk, blues group--played recently, as they do every month, at Toni's Soup Kitchen in Montclair during a Saturday luncheon...

Around the corner from the main shopping street in Chatham, a building's exposed flank spoke of wear wrought by the elements...

That was the punchline of an old Lenny Bruce routine in which a Genie mans a soda fountain and a customer says, "Make me a malted." Anyway, at this soda fountain it looks like you can safely order a malted without becoming one.

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...

A homespun bit of interior decorating in a men's room painted a buttery sunshine...

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

At play in the fields of electromagnetism...

If you're close enough to read this sign...

Your faithful pizza explorer made it to Neptune City, where restaurants instead of a fork should give you a trident. Neptune, of course, is the home of the estimable Pete & Elda's...

Doing my due diligence for our upcoming pizza issue, I'm scouting the best pizza joints in the state. Just went to Bayonne on a reader's recommendation to experience the thin crust pie at Venice Restaurant. It was excellent, but so was this little corridor between the bar and the outdoor seating area...

At Grissini Restaurant in Englewood Cliffs, a special chef comes in once a week to make several gallons of tomato sauce--the owner, 71-year-old Tony DelGatto. The proof of this particular pudding is in the smelling...

With a break in the drizzly weather, I was overdue for a trip to the car wash. Then a funny thing happened...

Recently I toured the Thumann's deli plant in Carlstadt for a story for our December issue, whose cover theme is NJ ROOTS: AN ETHNIC PORTRAIT OF THE GARDEN STATE. The Thumanns (whose name, owing to marriage, is now Burke) are one of 12 families profiled in the issue...

This ghost missed the party, and wound up in a doctor's office...

Looking through a smiling face to the construction materials behind...

The chain-link fence around the new luxury condo development on the Green in Morristown is alive with people whose beauty is only skin deep...

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

This Jersey City brownstone has quite a stoop to conquer tomorrow night...

I took this picture in Jersey City on October 13, and the display had already been up for awhile...

Renovations often look worse for a long time before they start to look better...

Don't know why these were hanging up, and my bad for not asking. But they sure introduced a sober note as the tumblers tumbled and the agitators agitated and the people folded their laundry...

Well, yes, I was...

Drove by this panel truck the other day, and snapped this picture. Mondrian, eat your heart out...

Yesterday's commute was a bear. Traffic bumper to bumper for a mile or more, from 280 to 80 to 287. About a 30-minute delay, most of it spent not moving at all. The only thing to do--for me, anyway--was reach for the camera and roll down a window...

The front of this shoe repairman's shop was blocked off for reconstruction of the building's facade, so all customers were directed to the back...

Can't quite make out the name of this painting company, but wonder how they got an old mailbox to use? It sure isn't an official one...

After almost a year of shopping, dithering, shopping, finding reasons not to buy, shopping some more, flirting with Cash for Clunkers, backing off, brooding, and finally buying (well, leasing), we got a new car last week. Now, in addition to pinching pennies, I am pinching myself...

The Spirit Cruise boats pull in to Chelsea Piers...

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...

Where 18-wheel cowboys corral their 10-wheel mounts...

Anyone remember Mister Magoo (whose voice was Jim Backus)? Or am I dating myself? The latter, I know. Anyway, this one's for him...

Just a few hundred yards from the Lincoln Park Driving Range in Jersey City, Duncan Avenue dead ends at the Hackensack River, just above where it and the Passaic River empty into Newark Bay. It's quite a sight...

I recently met fellow photographer (though he's a pro) and golfer (though he's a low-handicapper) Chris Lane at what may be the funkiest driving range I've ever hit balls at--On Route 440 in Jersey City, with a backdrop no other driving range can claim--the Pulaski Skyway...

So I was walking down Brackett Street in Portland, Maine, last week, when I stopped to photograph an interesting sandwich of houses...

During the four days I spent in Portland, Maine last week, I noticed that all the electric meters are on the outside of the houses, which in the neighborhood (near Longfellow Square) where I was staying were all small, multi-family dwellings...

I mean "fishin'" figuratively, in that the only thing I cast was a credit card, but I did eat a lot of seafood during my four days in Maine. If you're up in Kennebunkport...

Plain Sight will take a breather as I head to Portland, Maine for a family wedding and a few days of R&R. Back Wednesday, Sept. 2. Meanwhile, a few vacationy images...

...there's a way (to make a bad pun). And not even an accurate one, since the theme of this junkyard in Jersey City is old tires, not wheels. For a look at a really big wheel, um, tire, click...

Behind a bed & breakfast in Great Barrington, Mass., I came across this scene. which went poof about 15 minutes later when a car parked right in front of the sheet of glass...

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...

Sustainable, shmainable. At the end of the day, or even before, my eye is drawn to what my eye is drawn to. And, yes, I found it at the Griggstown Quail Farm during the Sustenance Events fundraiser for Slow Food New Jersey. My kind of sustenance...

Margaret Noon's Sustenance Events company recenty held a benefit for the New Jersey Slow Food movement at the Griggstown Quail Farm, near Princeton. Prior to an excellent four-course dinner under a white tent in a vast grassy field, the patrons received a tour of the farm and were introduced to some of its feathered inhabitants...

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

Kathryn Bigelow's riveting movie, The Hurt Locker, about a U.S. Army bomb squad in Iraq, has the verisimilitude of a documentary. The title is bomb squad slang for the world of pain the soldiers will be in if they fail to "clear" one of the roadside improvised explosive devices they spend their days tracking down and disarming.

Somewhat closer to home, I visited another, much milder kind of hurt locker...

At the center of town, the clock above a bank is beautiful. So what if it doesn't work...

Odd to peel the whole banana before taking a bite, especially a trombone of a banana like this one, unless you were going to slice it into cornflakes or something. But whatever works.

Having finished his dough, master pizza chef Antonino Esposito, visiting restaurant A Mano in Ridgewood from Naples, Italy, demonstrated the correct way to turn a bowl full of whole peeled Italian tomatoes (pomodoro) into sauce for his classic Neapolitan-style pizza...

Antonino Esposito, a star of the Food Network in Italy and a renowned pizza chef of the style practiced in Naples, gave a demonstration at A Mano in Ridgewood yesterday...

On a recent trip to the zoo, the lions and zebras gazed out from soda dispensers--and a young father entertained his baby in a stroller with a green serpent...

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...

Walking down the street I passed a variety store with an odd juxtaposition in the window...

When you're in Union, there is only one place to go for hot dogs--the Galloping Hill Inn. No matter that it isn't really an inn. It looks more like a diner with a big takeout area in the back, which is where the action is.

Where two lumbering old machines go to rust away, unless someone should want to call them out of retirement, the Mets, for example...

A side street, a patch of green, and late afternoon sun...

You can find all manner of things here, but first you have to pay your respects to the owl...

They say you should never look at a restaurant's kitchen if you want to feel good about eating there.

But what about the back of a restaurant?

This space heater on a restaurant patio is just hanging out this summer, not doing any work for the next couple of months as flowers bloom beside it...

At an auto body shop, this broken construction block seemed to beckon me into its tucked-away temple...

On an office window sill, a shrine to pastimes...

Oh, the compromising positions you get into working on your car...

..if you violate these rules.

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...

Even in the shadows, he catches your eye...

Here's how it's done in Jersey City...

Ever wonder what Santa's elves do in the off-season?

Where these signs of the times go when the market is slow?

We pulled into this unpromising station for a tank of gas, and while it was pumping, my wife found three stylish straw sunhats inside...

From this vantage point a block away, with an interestingly cordoned motorcycle in the foreground, yes you can...

Through these portals pass people hungry for Mexican food...

At a newly renovated car wash in Verona, this tableau of American values...

My cat is so old, in people years, that he should be playing pinochle in Miami Beach. Here is what the vet said is ailing him...

Okay, that kind of joke probably was not what this youngster was telling. But just after school in downtown Jersey City, she held her audience rapt for at least a minute after this picture was taken...

At this pig roast, they served some mighty fine swine, making hogs of us all...

I have a series of pictures I call "Souls Have Shapes." The title comes from the first stanza of a poem, "My Sisters," by Stanley Kunitz:

Who whispered, souls have shapes?/ So does the wind, I say./ But I don't know,/ I only feel things blow.

Most of you are too young to remember this song by the J. Geils Band, but it was a hit when I was in college in Boston, which is where the band is from. I hadn't thought of the song or the band until just now, when I sat down to post today's Plain Sight picture...

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.

Sometimes I just like to stare at the evidence...

My wife and I are heading to Connecticut this weekend to watch our son, Michael, graduate from Wesleyan on Sunday. I am taking off in another sense, too. Michael spent a few days on Cape Cod with friends recently, and he emailed me this photograph he took in an alley near where they were staying. Check it out. The kid's got an eye, and a sensibility.

Until yesterday and today, spring looked and felt a lot like what you see here. Click below to see full picture...

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...

I don't know about you, but I feel better knowing the person drawing my blood is wearing a latex-free, powder-free, ambidextrous, Med Pride vinyl examination glove and has a little play sunflower attached to her station.

One thing I like about blood tests--probably the only thing--is the colorful paraphernalia, especially the specimen vials with their color-coded caps and mysterious preservative gel at the round end...

Awaiting the tourniquet and needle for a blood test, I did what anyone with a camera would do--look for pictures.

Catch 'em while you can. The dogwood blossoms will be on the ground before you can bark up the wrong tree.

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

In the lobby of a busy hotel, a dark ascent to a landing in the sun...

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.

At Steel Pier in Atlantic City, a vendor dispenses Boardwalk vittles...

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.

Late afternoon sun does something even for entrances not ready for their closeup...

If on the inside it looks like a diner, serves like a diner, charges like a diner and satisfies like a diner, but occupies just part of a plain brick building on a street corner in Cape May, it is a diner, and a darn good one at that.

Before there was SPF, there were these...

There's more to the peninsula that is Cape May County than the Wildwoods and Cape May. Drive northwest from Cape May and you find yourself among the towns facing the Delaware Bay...

And so we come to the end of our series on the pre-season amusement park, shot at Morey's Piers in Wildwood. We close with one of the most iconic of all rides...

Through these portals at Morey's Piers pass Curly Fries, made with fresh potatoes. In the heat of midsummer, the aroma alone is worth the trip.

I loved these as a little kid, but even then it irked me that no matter what I did with the steering wheel the car continued to move mulishly in the same plodding circle.

What goes up must come down, whether it's the roller coaster or the metal weight that, if you're strong enough, rings the bell when you slam the sledgehammer down.

Step right up and buy a ticket to ride...once Morey's Piers opens for the season, that is.

Morey's Piers in Wildwood, before the season opens--silent, still, pristine...

Stillness is even more still in a place that is the antithesis of still--an amusement park.

Here the first in a series of pictures taken walking around Morey's Piers in Wildwood before it opens for the season.

Ah, the robin's chirp, the daffodil's bloom, the leaf blower's ceaseless whine. A sure sign of spring is the return of landscapers' trucks to suburban neighborhoods, gathering up winter's flotsam and jetsam...

In today's resonant finale, we look back at the stairwell and all the neatly hung household cleaning implements it contains, each a tiny soul awaiting its moment in the schmutz...

In today's exciting episode, we reach the top of the stairs and look back...

Friends in Long Branch have just moved into their first home—a beautifui and cozy one in Craftsman style. One of my favorite parts of the house is the back stairs from the basement to the kitchen.

Assisted living and better nursing homes make these the good old days for many elderly Jerseyans...

Sometimes I just can't resist traffic cones, especially errant ones. I cropped them out of this thumbnail, so you'll just have to click to the full picture to see them.

In the laundry room of a home in Long Branch, this tableau brought to mind an ocean liner and its escorts, a sovereign and its retainers...

A day at the dentist. Sip, swirl, spit. Ptooey in pink...

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

Excessive cuteness makes my teeth hurt, but in this case my tooth already hurt for another reason, and I found the tableau in the dentist's examining room amusing.

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...

Yesterday's late afternoon sun begged to be beheld and basked in, and on St. Patrick's Day what better place than by a bright green door?

I drove by the body shop to see about getting my 20-year-old BMW repainted, but they were closed. No problem, I had my 40D with me...

It served me well for half a century, but when it comes to sore molars, the squeaky wheel doesn't get the grease, it gets the hook...

Plain Sight's ten-photograph series on a trip through the car wash concludes with a lone figure waiting for her vehicle...

All good things come to an end, including the drag line at the car wash...

Having your car washed is an old-fashioned pleasure in at least two ways: it's a mechanical process (you can actually watch what's happening step-by-step, as opposed to the invisibility, the inscutability of digital), and it requires manual labor by human beings at the beginning and end of the process. For example, the initial drying...

I originally promised six Wash Cycle pictures, but hey, I seem to be on a roll, so it's on to bonus time.

In today's Plain Sight, midway through the tunnel of scrub at Palace Car Wash in Montclair, we encounter...the dancing sponges!

One of the pleasures of having your car washed is that the process has a distinct beginning, middle and end, like life itself. Watching your car inch through that tunnel of scrub, with its fulsome sprays and blinking lights, and emerge in the sunshine dripping as from a baptism, is to participate in a kind of secular born-again ritual.

Click to see whole picture...

,,,to bring you a snowstorm. We'll get back to The Wash Cycle 5 when cars start lining up outside car washes again.

Today we move from clothing to cars. First, the residue of brisk business paints the pavement.

Village Laundry in Upper Montclair has some serious hangups.

Who says a laundromat can't venture into the deep waters of interior decoration?

The entrance to Village Laundry in Upper Montclair, seen from within, begins Plain Sight's six-part series on two very different sudsing spots.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geitner has his version, which has been criticized as vague, and so does this Montclair hardware store. Its version is not vague so much as contradictory.

click next line to see full picture...

Be it ever so humble, a table and chairs on the front porch is still pretty inviting.

Was Christo in Morristown last week?

It was a rush to the bottom as two leaders met behind the Saunders Hardware Store in Upper Montclair.

My aches and pains are nothing compared to those this man unkinks in my 20-year-old BMW, whose 189,000 miles dwarf even the large number of annums on my odometer.

On a sunny winter day you can see slush-spattered vehicles lining up halfway down the block to be vaccumed, hosed, blow-dried and buffed. No coins please. Leave a greenback in the old-fashioned mail box strategically placed within reach as you step out the exit and head toward your still-dripping mount.

Johnny's in the basement, mixing up the medicine...Today's picture (the whole image, not the thumbnail here) reminds me of that line from Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues." It wasn't the basement or the same kind of medicine, but it was strong stuff.

Just a random piece of road near Chatham, but with snow falling and the branches sheathed in crystal kind of beautiful.

Two squat brick buildings inject autumnal color into a gray-and-white scene behind locked chain-link gates.

The Magley real estate office in Chatham, and its brethren in the background, inject blocks of color into a gray and white world.

Another day, another TV interview promoting our February "Recession Pricing" restaurant issue. Evidently it takes someone with a ladder to do the dishes at WMBC-TV in West Caldwell.

They don't call it cable TV for nothing.

No excuse for tardiness here...

I've been making the rounds of television stations lately, talking about our February Dining issue. This was the studio at Time Warner Cable in Palisades Park.

The view from inside a storage closet at the Pierro Gallery in South Orange. What was I doing in a storage closet at the Pierro Gallery in South Orange? You'll have to click to find out.

In what untrammeled part of the state was this snowy landscape photographed?

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.

In Meadowland Park in South Orange, a lone spot of green keeps the hardy happy.

If you're like me, you never walk past a pickup truck without taking a peek at what's in the bed. You see some  interesting things that way.

What I did on my winter vacation--browsed the big open-air Albert Cuypmarkt in Amsterdam. That would be well east of the Holland Tunnel...in Holland, where this Jersey Boy felt right at home

Just back from a week's vacation in Amsterdam, where I found one ageless American icon ringing a Dutch bell.

Plain Sight, a Jersey Photo Blog, first blinked its eye at the world on Wed, Apr 23.

To celebrate its first calendar year--and the fact that I am on vacation until Monday, January 12--here is a slideshow of some of my favorite images, drawn from the more than 200 pictures I posted in 2008.

The scene on Myrtle Avenue in Montclair late during a recent filming of a commercial at one of the gracious old homes where production companies like to shoot commercials and the residents are paid very well and everything is put back together afterward better than it ever was beforehand. Sweet deal.

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.

The gang's all here. Now, can we get 56 eyelids open at the same time, with 28 eyeballs looking into the lens?

How to photograph 28 people in one living room at my family's annual Hanukah party.

Through this door pass students in thrall to the classical masks.

Actress Amanda Bynes has a hang up in the Waldwick High School cafeteria.

Walking along Glenridge Avenue in Montclair, I stopped to enjoy the geometry of storefronts.

It's rare to see a vacant lot in the thickly settled northern suburbs anymore. When you do see one, the contrast between something and nothing is striking.

Yes, right in downtown Montclair, outside the Wellmont Theater. Residents are peeved that the trailers eat up parking spaces, and they have a case. But from a photographer's point of view, the trailers are kind of cool.

In this age of personal pan pizzas,  personal digital assistants and Smart Cars barely bigger than a suitcase, the mini-bulldozer has become a construction site mascot.

Though the Wellmont Theater in Montclair has been open more than a month, renovation mop-up remains.

I'm glad I happened by before the clean-up, because the search for order in disorder is one of photography's great pleasures.

At a lonely table for one, late at a wedding in Long Branch, burning the candle literally at one end, figuratively at both.

Talk about a windshield filler. Such is the view from the driver's seat as I sat behind a dump truck at a red light in West Orange.

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?

What's a nice boy from New Jersey doing dreaming of England at the end of Thanksgiving weekend?

String and a hook make the last roundup for a passel of bacalao at Corrado's in Clifton.

...doesn't mean you're safe on Thanksgiving. Especially at Corrado's in Clifton.

After the chafing dishes have been swept away, the wedding cake has been cut and the crowd has migrated to the dance floor, leave it to Mr. Lugubrious to find an altar of conjugal emptiness.

A wedding in Long Branch brings to mind John Updike's wonderful brief essay, "Women Dancing."

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

An auto repair shop takes on a Raymond Chandler aura under glancing headlights.

The royal road to the unconscious? Not quite, but a certain old-fashioned dignity, middle-class grandeur, Hollywood's red carpet transposed to a minor key on a quiet side street in Montclair...

The haphazard leftovers of urban planning, or the lack of it. But at least it's green.

Strange things you see while waiting in the examining room.

I don't mean this cute little kid, and I'm not casting aspersions on our praiseworthy Top Docs, either. But click and I think you will agree with my characterization.

It may seem I'm speaking in tongues, but sadly  I'm simply succumbing to sophomoric silliness (and my.soft spot for same starting sounds, aka alliteration).

Yesterday's plain sight was Funnel Alley. Reverse that and you have today's Plain Sight.

How many shapes do alleys come in? Has there ever been one exactly like this?

A moment of silence for a piece of summer furniture--dashed, wet and alone, out of sorts and out of season. I'm getting misty-eyed. Or is that the rain?

If the sign looks like this, you haven't lost, you've won. Buon appetito!

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

Metal-framed, arch-shaped storage tents are becoming more common, but to me there is still something exotic and mysterious about them. They have an almost Christo meets Joe Sixpack quality.

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

On the bulletin board, behind a coat rack, at a company in Cedar Knolls, Morris County.

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

for leaving my camera at home during a quick stop at my mechanic's place in Caldwell to drop off my car. All I had with me was my brand new iPhone.

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

Some pictures I take I know why I like. Some I can only hazard a guess. This is one of those.

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

I was interviewed at a New Jersey radio station earlier this month, and it brought back memories of my days (make that nights, late nights) hosting a jazz show on WBUR-FM, the Boston University NPR affiliate, when I was in college.

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

Some have already folded their canopies for the season, others will end the last weekend of this month. But a few continue into November. And at least two go year 'round.

An oasis in a parking lot, a place to sit and eat and watch the ivy twine.

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

The TV series had drama and suspense. This wire has mystery.

...What the back of a garden center looks like?

Neither have I.

That is, until I accidentally wandered into one....

Soon every front porch will have its own organic gargoyle sporting the only gap-toothed grins that don't need orthodonture.

15,000 pounds of porgies, fresh out of Casco Bay, off Portland, Maine, are trucked to a warehouse on Custom House Wharf in Portland, where they will become lobster bait--and seagull supper.

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

Rush hour traffic jams on I-287 are good for at least one thing...

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

My wife and I pulled into the parking lot of Sickles Market in Little Silver 15 minutes before it closed on Sunday evening.

In July, NJM wrote about the 100th anniversary of this immaculate, family-run farm, food market and plant nursery (click here to read the story). Now at last was my chance to see it. But as we pulled into a parking spot, the descending sun announced a 15-minute special of its own.

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

Across the street from Holsten's, where Tony Soprano went for his last double dip, stands a sunny corner storefront where I take my dry cleaning and have pants taken in or let out, depending on how many Holsten's visits I've recently racked up or been able to resist..

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

Pushing past the shrubs, we emerged on the rocks of Trundy Point, overlooking Casco Bay, just south of Portland, Maine.

Fond as I am of the Jersey Shore, I had to admit, "We're not in the Garden State anymore."

Leaving the road, we crossed a bit of sandy beach and climbed a rocky outcrop thickly covered with wild berry bushes and shrubbery. A narrow path led toward a break in the bushes, beyond which Casco Bay spread to the ocean under a dramatic sky.

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

Plain Sight is back in the enveloping embrace, or clutches, of home. As promised, or warned, a few  visual mementoes of my trip to Portland, Maine...

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

Plain Sight is on vacation, 340 miles from New Jersey, in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

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

Plain Sight is loading the big rig for a small trip.

Actually, it will be a small rig, but a big trip.

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

A secular altar tilted at the sun...

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

Incandescent bulbs in the sunlight, a milky way of the midway...

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

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.

I was walking to my car in a parking lot on Church Street in Montclair. I have parked in this lot hundreds of times, but each time I look at the same white brick wall to see how the light is hitting it and whether something, in some way, is new.

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

The sun was low in the sky when I pulled into Hot Dog Johnny's, the roadfood landmark on Route 46 in Buttzville, a few miles east of the Delaware River in Warren County.

The sun cast an orange glow over the green and orange awning, the several Harleys in the parking lot and the forearm of the young man in the passenger seat of the car next to mine.

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

It depends on which side of the point-and-shoot you're on.

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

On a bench on the promenade at Pier Village in Long Branch, a mother and daughter had a heart-to-heart while the menfolk did what menfolk do, at least if you ask the women.

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

As seasonal as the weekenders who bask beneath them, palm trees on the Jersey Shore have to be replanted each summer, just ahead of the snowbirds who follow them north.

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

My stroll up the Long Branch boardwalk next brought me to a bench where a young woman in a funny hat was taking pictures of her husband and twin boys as they munched on floppy white bread sandwiches. Clouds had covered the sun, but their radiance was undimmed.

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

As I passed the refreshment stand (see yesterday's Plain Sight) and continued my stroll up the Long Branch boardwalk, a boy ran after me, waving a white piece of paper...

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

Justine Pecora, a sophomore at Caldwell College, has spent the summer selling soft pretzels and ice cream and drinks and candy to people on the Long Branch boardwalk. It's a hard job, but there are compensations...

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

Sleep on a park bench, even at high noon, and a cop is likely to tap you on the shoulder and tell you to move on.

Do the same thing on the boardwalk and you are left to your sweet dreams...

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

You feel you will mess with the dude's vibe if you ask him to okay your beach badge.

Skateboarders get in free if they can grind the handrail alongside the stairs to the beach.

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

While this fellow took the measure of the waves, two young women stood on the boardwalk, lost in thought.

Click below to see full picture.

And nearly wordless.

Join me tonight, Sat Aug 9, between 5 and 10 pm, for the opening reception of the new photography exhibit at Andy Foster's Gallery 51 in Montclair.

I'm in the show along with five other photographers, all interesting and accomplished.

Thank you gift for anyone who mentions PLAIN SIGHT....

Once the hygienist lowers you to the horizontal, there is not much to look at other than the dental hygienist herself (very rude) or the dental light shining above your head....

When I say I take my camera everywhere, I mean everywhere, even to the dentist's office.

You have a lot of time of your hands when the hygienist goes to process the digital x-rays. But if those hands are holding a camera...

After the wind and rain, the snake dance in Montclair...

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.

Somewhere around the turn of the millenium the blue polyethylene tarp became the universal symbol of suburban exterior home improvement. Now every house painter is a pocket Christo.

It's fine by me. I like my McMansions wrapped.

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.