East 5th Street, 8:30 AM

This is a photo of Sophie's from a few weeks ago when I had an early morning assignment in the far East Village. I made a point of walking by Sophie's to see it in a new light. Now, I've never lasted long enough at Sophie's to witness the bar being closed after last call. So for some reason I had envisioned there being a protective gate or shutters pulled down over the windows like 99 percent of all New York businesses. But since it's an old storefront there aren't any and thus I was able to look in from right up against the window. I was stoked to discover the fluorescent light in the back is kept on nightly, bathing the pool table in a cold glow as it lords over the empty space.

Unless you've been in Sophie's a number of times this probably looks like a night shot. But the quality of light in this photo is vastly different from night. Here, the light from the window is blasting the far back wall, revealing all sorts of texture and character not visible at night. The beer taps on the left side, and the bar stools, are all very oddly reflective of the light coming through the window. That morning I ran into a Sophie's neighborhood regular, who told me that the first time he noticed Sophie's was walking by on his way to work one morning years ago and noticing people still inside drinking. That's a pretty funny scene to imagine, especially considering the lack of window shutters.

On a side note, when Google recently released its new "Street View" feature I immediately went to check out the images from 5th Street. Not that I was expecting to see myself outside of Sophie's, I just had to see how it looked. There it was (below), plain as day and waiting for customers. Speaking of "Street View", check out 2point8, a fantastic blog done by fellow photographer Michael David Murphy, who in a recent post compares his own street photographs to those taken by Google's robot street photographer.