the BackStory to:   Amsterdam Blue Concerto*Amsterdam, Holland -- 2008

         I rounded the corner off the Lijnbaansgracht (canal) and encountered three Amsterdam police officers standing there having a discussion on the sidewalk among parallel lines of Amsterdammertje (traffic posts) lining the street in the mid-ground and background. I stalked the police for a couple of minutes hoping some kind of other stimulating Amsterdam element would serendipitously wander or bike past. I made a couple of frames using passers by  as accents -- but then all of a sudden one of the cops noticed what I was doing and took a step forward toward me with his hand outstretched in a halting gesture and he ordered me to stop taking pictures of he and his colleagues.

        Of course I immediately let my camera hang slack and then I took a couple of steps his way to meet him as I began protesting his request. "But officer -- my name is Gary Smith," I began, "and I've been an Amsterdam street photographer for more than twenty five years now and you know very well that you can't legally stop anyone from taking your picture in a public place."

        I was bluffing, because I'm not really up on the finer points of Dutch law concerning troublemakers like me taking pictures of the police, but I bluffed well and he bought it, his eyes shifting left and right as he spun the card catalog of his memory wondering about the validity of my confident assertion of legal rights.  "Sure," I said, "if I refuse your request, you could probably conjure up a disorderly conduct charge without much worry. But hell -- -- -- the three of you are just out here doing your jobs, not doing anything improper in the least, so what would be the harm of getting a few photographs of Amsterdam's finest at work?"

        "But why us?," he asked me.

        "Well," I told him, "say an Amsterdam girl on a flowered Amsterdam bike peddles past you three working the street and past all those Amsterdammertjes. What a great Amsterdam composition that might make?"

        On hearing my unblinking confidence of their Dutch law and my opinion of hard working peace officers and my hope for serendipitous artistic composition and the rest of my overtly charming explanation for stalking them -- the cop broke out into a smile (all three of them did) and we all shook hands and I returned bemused to my original vantage point -- -- -- when all of a sudden in very quick succession, a car out of view to the right stopped, the driver opened his window and asked the policeman for directions, and the musician with the interestingly decorated sitar case stepped into the frame and click ... ... ... I barely had time to make the image -- the exact type of defining Amsterdam image I'd been after ever since I'd rounded the corner a couple of minutes earlier and spotted the potentially bold arrangement of local elements and imagined the possibilities.

        It was one of those perfect moments I get out there, and so when the officer was done giving directions to the driver and he was returning to where the other police were standing, I stepped back over to them and showed them the shot on the playback screen on the back of the camera. They looked at it and each of them smiled, two of them giggled out loud, and then the lead officer (the one walking out of the photo on the right to give directions) shook my hand again -- and then he actually apologized for having disturbed me in the first place...

        "Wow," I thought to myself as I continued on my way down the street...
 

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