[imagesource: Paul Kessel]

Walking a city street is often a mundane, everyday activity, and just a way of getting from A to B.

The hustle and bustle around us can be easy to overlook, but if one stops a moment and looks around, there are magical moments ready to be snapped.

The shot above of a mother and her children on the Q Train in New York is a good example.

Paul Kessel took the opportunity to capture them in a pose like angels in a renaissance painting, with colours and patterns holding everything together.

He was one of the finalists in this year’s Street Photographers Foundation Awards

Photographers who submitted this year managed some incredible photography of “surreal scenes and broken dreams” says The Guardian.

Dutchman Maude Bardet’s ‘Goat Auction in Nizwa’, which is in Oman, helped him become the single photo winner:

The series winner was Dimitri Mellos for his photos titled ‘Oblivious City’, with two of his more striking shots below:

This is some of what he has to say about his art:

I walk the streets of New York City and photograph strangers. Serendipity, evanescence, a deep respect for and affirmation of the world as encountered: these are the elements that are essential to my approach.

The scope of my photos is narrow and mundane, like the lives they depict – like the lives of most of us. But I seek glimpses of transcendence in the mundane. I am interested in fleeting gestures and glances, moments of connection in the urban flow, the ephemeral dance of light and shadow and street life.

Photographer Alan Burles captures the surrealism of the everyday.

As a series finalist, here are two interesting photographs that are worth noting.

First up, the giant eyeball at Clapham Junction in London:

“I never asked why the man had a huge eyeball lying next to him on the station platform – maybe he worked in a props department. But when his train came in he got on and this lovely accident happened. Maybe Big Brother really is watching us wherever we go”

Also at Clapham Junction in a cafe called Kebab Feast Take Away, Burles managed to capture another moment of magic:

Then we have Subhran Karmakar’s serendipitous shot, which makes for a rather hopeful image of a dog sprouting wings as a pigeon flies up at just the right moment.

He is a finalist for “Dog Got Wings”, which he shot in Kolkata, India at a wedding:

Less hopeful and more heartbreaking is series finalist Andy Hann’s take on what appears to be someone in a princess costume looking rather forlorn.

It is titled ‘Reality Bites’:

We feel you, princess, we feel you.

For more surreal scenes and broken dreams, head here.

[source:guardian]