Look Girls, a Good-Looking Guy!**+ *

I'm a little confused by your post and where to find your photo. Let me know, would you? Best is to post it in-line, no more than 510 pixels wide and no more than 100k. That way those browsings can take a look at it also

I'd love to see it.

I've decided (as I wrote a Ukrainian friend in a recent letter) that Dnepropetrovsk, for all its poverty, is one of the more romantic places in the world -- there's a lot of kissing going on, even in winter snowstorms, and in the Spring, everybody's kissing. (See my Seasons folder for a few of them and I may add more.)

John (Crosley)

This photo has fairly high ratings, a high viewership and numerous comments -- it's touched a nerve obviously.

I hadn't anticipated that when I took it, as it sat in my 'to post' folder for a couple of months, and got no excitement when I took it, other than a brief exhilaration for a workmanlike photo well-taken.

I've taken far better photos with '3s for ratings or low '4s in my own ratings schema, and I'm not so sure this photo is as good as the raters say it is, but then they're the raters, and not me. Somehow, I've missed the enthusiasm about this photo; I have enthusiasm about other photos that others can't see at all.

Go figure.

John (Crosley)

This one John - I mischievously added more photos after posting my above message.

Ratings rarely, if ever, make sense to me either.

Of course you've seen my photo of the 'jaguar' 'chasing' the young men, one of whom has his mouth open in a most interesting way.

Look in my early B&W folder -- it's a similar idea, and I like the way it worked out -- photographically it turned out just to be a pleasing photograph with a bit of humor and justified the hours I spent waiting for something interesting with that backdrop.

Sorry I can't post a link.

John (Crosley)

... earlier poster cut the image at the guy's elbow ... can't do it. The real story is that the two girls on the left like the guy with the cell phone, but the burnette only has eyes for the photographer. That's the real lesson in the shot.

Love the discussion about large format graphics. My whole previous career was about getting good high resolution imagery to print at enormous scales. Used to go down Times Square and look closely at the images and be disappointed to see the huge screen patterns for printing. Now, you can go out and see these gigantic prints that look wonderful even from short distances. But now, when I see how easy it is to produce these graphics, I wonder why I ever bothered, they're just ads. But you've given me another perspective. Crosley will use them as backgrounds for wonderful street photography!

Dennis, this was taken in one of my favorite towns (a city actually) for 'street photography -- Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine -- with its host of beautiful women some of whom will model for very low wages and work like the devil and also appreciate if the photographer produces good work (you won't find my 'girl' or female photos here, however, at least in any abundance).

This photo here was almost embarrassingly easy to take and present; just hang around briefly at the street corner/square catty corner from the huge drug store/variety store and wait until someone came into view of their huge graphics, which identifies this particular chain across parts of Ukraine (perhaps all of Ukraine, but I can't know that).

Another one or two of the same wall are scattered throughout my portfolio folders -- look for one with two men working with bricks/stones and girl(s) looking down on them, laughing (taken just around the corner and from the same set of posters on an entirely different day and the only day ever in modern history that men have worked with stones/brick there).

That one I really had to work for, as opposed to this, but it's not the work you do, sometimes, it's the product one produces . . . one of my most recognizable shots is 'I (shape of heart meaning 'love') U' in tape on a broken windshield with the heart being made up of a hole in the glass and the tape having been applied by someone else. But I photographed this mysterious windshield, though others tried and failed to do so well (you can't stand eight feet away with a point and shoot and fill 1/60th of the frame with the subject and get an acceptable photo -- it called for a telephoto).

If you're gonna shoot 'street' I realized when I first visited that community, go to where people have small flats, poor opportunities for recreation, and then they go and live on the street. That's where you'll not just find the homeless and dispossessed on the street, but regular, ordinary people, and suddenly the world that Cartier-Bresson explored in his earlier years somehow becomes more available -- a world that increasingly has become cut off to the photographer in the really well developed western nations where affluence places all interactions within the home, business or the personal auto (or inside restaurants where photographing is scorned).

Willie Sutton had it right. If you're gonna rob, go where the money is (banks). I shoot street, so I make a point of getting to where the 'street life' is. I'll try to find more and different interesting places, but feel at home in that particular city/town.

Best wishes. I've enjoyed your various comments.

John (Crosley)