Forget your selfie sticks, and let the city Department of Transportation do the work.
New Yorkers can now use DOT traffic cameras to create their own personal photo booths by taking unique snapshots of themselves off the surveillance footage, with Big Apple vistas in the background.
TrafficCamPhotoBooth.com, a Web site created by Morry Kolman of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, launched Monday and gives locals access to more than 900 city traffic cameras in real time by linking users up to the DOT’s readily available streams on its own site.
Users can select from a Polaroid or photo-booth-strip format, find the closest traffic camera, strike a pose and say “cheese!” — then press a button icon to grab the bold photo op.
“What I like about this project specifically is that people love to be given something, especially something about themselves,” Kolman, 28, told The Post.
“Giving people the opportunity to take selfies of themselves through these traffic cameras, I thought was a really interesting and fun way to kind of raise awareness about large surveillance apparatus that’s around New York City in a way that is fun and kind of light-hearted and people want to engage with because they get something out of engaging with it,” the creator said.
Three days after the site went live, Kolman had tracked 3,880 visits to his site, and 918 photos had been taken.
What makes for a good traffic camera photo? Wearing bright clothing, posing with large groups – and most importantly, looking both ways before crossing the street, Kolman said.
“Stop traffic with your looks, not your body,” the Web site advises.
Traffic-camera models should also hold poses for a few seconds at a time to allow the cameras to snap a shot.
Kolman, a Bronx High School of Science graduate who goes by “WTTDOTM” online, conceived of the Traffic Camera Photo Booth on his own while taking an art class called Imperfect Pictures at the School for Poetic Computation.
“The prompt that inspired this one specifically is, ‘Take a picture without taking it.’ The idea was to find a way to take a picture without being the one to ‘push the shutter,’ ” Kolman said.
The first iteration of the project took a few hours to construct and a week and a half for the final product. Some users asked why he didn’t make an app.
“Making an app sucks and costs money and I have to pay Apple,” Kolman explained.“I guess this [Web site] is one of my many contributions to places that are interesting online that do things that are just independent, free, interesting and have some effect in the world, hopefully.”
Kolman said New York City serves as the perfect backdrop for the project given that its traffic happens at intersections, while a lot of other cities’ traffic is on highways.
“People can go on intersections, but I’m not going to encourage people to walk out on [highways] and try to take a selfie that way, right?” Kolman said. “That just makes the traffic cameras pretty amenable, in New York at least, to taking photos.”
Traffic cameras in New York City are also hosted through URLs, and the image at the URL will update every 2 seconds, Kolman said.
“I don’t have to do any work behind the scenes,” he said.
Kolman has already had numerous requests to expand the project to other cities. He looks forward to troubleshooting that and is eyeing Atlanta or Salt Lake City as the next step in the project.
As it stands, the project exists on the open-source platform GitHub and is accessible to anyone who wants to take the reins and implement it in their city.
This isn’t Kolman’s first project that got him recognition. He and cofounder Alex Petros created an online conceptual art project called We Are Internet.
The pair received attention for two projects: “Are You The Asshole?” — a project about AI bias which went viral with 200k users in two days — and “Deface” about data surveillance.
Kolman doesn’t have access to the traffic-cam photos that are taken, but he says he hopes users will begin to tag him so he can see what people are doing with his Web site.
“I don’t get notified of which camera they’re using, so I can’t grab any of the same images that they are,” Kolman said.
The creator believes the Web site could live forever — since the only expense that Kolman accrued from making the site was paying around $10 for the domain.
