One day last week, this photographer found himself sitting after lunch in a rat-ridden alley behind a string of restaurants in Downtown Pittsburgh joining chefs, cooks, dishwashers and wait staff as they enjoyed short breaks after the establishments had emptied following the regular lunch hour rush. Everyone was relaxed, joking, smoking and getting their second wind before heading back to work prepping for the dinner customers. It was a remarkable sight. Expressive and revealing the work lives of Pittsburghers.

It was probably the furthest thing from my grandfather's mind when he and my grandmother presented me with a Kodak Brownie camera on my 5th birthday.

Like most Jewish grandparents and parents, they hoped that I would become a doctor, a lawyer or some kind of scientist. But I fell in love with taking candid photos (nudge nudge, wink wink) and the passion grew as I moved on through elementary school and on to high school. I even got my first job working for a photo studio when I was 14 and was encouraged by the owner to invest in a twin-lens reflex camera.

So there I was, visiting my grandfather at the New York camera store where he worked. I had about $100 in my pocket and was hot to buy a camera, so he took me down to the sales counter and introduced me to Lou Bernstein, a salesman who also wrote articles for a camera magazine. Lou was a devotee of the 35mm camera and described people of whom I had never heard -- Henri Cartier-Bresson, who documented life on the streets of Paris; Brassai, who did the same in the early 20th century; Weegee, the prototypical freelance news photographer; and W. Eugene Smith, the great photojournalist who worked for Life magazine and in the 1950s documented Pittsburgh.

With Lou's assistance, I converted my cash into an East German 35mm camera and began to shoot photos of life in my high school and in the city for a weekly newspaper.

And after four years of college, studying photojournalism at Kent State University, I found myself on the streets of Troy, N.Y., walking, always walking and taking pictures of life on the streets. I did the same in New York, and in Israel and then, after years of editing for wire services and newspapers, I felt the calling once again early this year to show people the people who lived and worked around them.

As the assistant managing editor for photography at the PG, I was all too aware of the limited time and space available in a daily newspaper for documentary features. However, this is the age of unlimited space on the Internet. Our new membership Web site, PG+, has provided the chance to walk a beat through the city of Pittsburgh. In a regular multimedia feature called "We Are Pittsburgh," I present traditional black-and-white images to those who want to study relationships, expressions and human interaction. I selected six for this page today.

Cartoonist Rob Rogers does "Rob's Rough," an early look at his work and his creative process, exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.