Howard Schatz has talked about the importance or utility of having a “personal image bank” of images you’ve seen and stored in memory, which you can use as a source of ideas for your own images. Walking around San Francisco on Thursday, I passed a building with massive pillars. Individuals or small groups of people were passing in front of it. The scene reminded me of “Wall Street,” a famous Paul Strand photograph. So I stood there for a few minutes photographing the scene.

It works well in monochrome, because there was hardly any color anyway, but removing any color makes the photo all about the shapes and forms and the relative size of the person and the building.

This is one other photo from that day. She was dressed in black and white, and I told her I was shooting in black and white and would like to take her picture. She was fine with it.

A piece of advice for street photographers is to get a good pair of shoes, because you’ll be walking around a lot. True. I walked around for several hours and got only a couple of shots I even wanted to process. But I was glad I was wearing a good pair of walking shoes. At least from that point of view, the trip was a success.