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Good scene, very elegant!

Fabulous shot. And it falls into the category of a traffic stopper!!

Nicely captured, well composed.

Excellent composition and conversion!

The young lady is a traffic stopper and your presentation is a scroll stopper!  Her choice of apparel and shoe issue makes me want to title this "Conundrum" :-).... Excellent shot...  Mike

Wonderful B&W image, Sid ... great textures & tone ... congrats !!

Very nice my friend, take care!

Thanks Svetlana, Warren, GungaJim, Lester, Vlad, Mike, Ricardo, Panayotis & Niels for commenting. It helps to be in the right place at the right time.

A very nice original street-shot, Sid!

Very very classy shot, great in mono.

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Really a great and elegant capture! The moment is wonderful for the sense of timing and a simple sensuality!

Excellent composition with fine grey tones , original model pose, elegance and fashion well combined! Regards Sergio

It is a good street ,timing plays a great importance in its appealing power ,I think the photographer have shot in a great hurry ,and that is apparent in its sub complete focus,it is a little blurred ,he didn't want to miss a second from the scene ,the elegance of the model adds and make the rest of the total appealing power of the image .

I like this picture...a lot! Whether by plan or happenstance, the photographer has caught a moment on the street which is beautiful in it's form, timing, composition and tonal quality. Such a common scene, a woman adjusting her shoe, shows the kind of art-in-life that takes a sensitive eye and quick trigger finger to capture. Her pose, and attractive figure, displays a beautiful form and is well set off by the simple gray wall with simple lines. By not showing the face the emphasis on the form is even greater and has a distinct fashion-feel to it. The hat adds a nice circular shape to the composition. The B&W rendering is yet another tool to enhance the graphic elements of the composition with a delightful arrangement of grays. One of the nicest POW I've seen in a long while.

She looked like a "human stork'..that was my first impression;-))

I like the femininity she conveys . The soft light and shadows on her body are enhancing her form and movement, creating some nice triangles. The black shoes and black band on her hat are creating as well a diagonal line that are a nice imaginative one, and a good "answer"to the background ,colors and lines.

I would say that it was the right photographer, at the right moment ,at the right street scene.

I join Louis that it is a very nice POW that was really well chosen, this time by the elves.

This has all the elements of what we have come to know and expect from a good and popular photo. It may be for that reason that I view it, am pleased by it in a sort of accepting and benign way, and forget about as I immediately move on, unchallenged, unprovoked, and mostly unmoved.

It looks the part: lovely tones and lovely woman's body, lovely fashion, style, and a steady, dependable geometric background. And it does still a familiar and endearing moment.

And then I'm done.

It just fits too much a mold, as if it comes readymade.

It is solidly made and is as good as a pianist seamlessly practicing his scales or a guitarist with great knowledge of his chord progressions.

I hear the sounds but not the music.

Saad: In my humble opinion, the blur gives the image a stronger sense of motion.

Fred
It can be a ready made, ( I did not understand the word mold connected to the photo, please explaine). You are right that it is not the photo that will keep my interest for long, but I still think it is well created as a composition of light color and forms., And even represents womanhood in a nice way.

After sometime that the POW was not very tasty, it is(IMO)a better choice.....

Fred's impression became mine as well at first sight until I started glancing back and noticing the overall unfashionably contorted, distorted onto discomforted woman's posture from adjusting her dangerously thin framed high heels making her appear as some type of injured swan caught and struggling within the snare of her own unnatural fashion sense. What? No hose with them heels? Who's she foolin'? She looks extremely vulnerable in a sad sort of way.

Look at her snarled toes arching back in repulsion like an animal not used to wearing shoes. Her identity, embarrassment and ego are safely hidden by the downward position of her head covered by an oversized hat.

Of course I'm probably just pointing out the obvious. I think there's more to this image than meets the eye though I've seen others like it but not having the woman's body contorted like this.

Yeah, Tim, I get that sensation too but I have to admit the position of those legs, and the way they echo the lines of the background, really ties the two into a graphic whole. My first thought was this was the brain child of a smart fashion creative director and a pro model and the entire thing is posed exactly, but the blur of the feet and some of the fashion details (bracelets look cheesy, hat is a bit too floppy) makes me think this is a street grab shot. If so, it is street photography of high order (according to my taste anyway).

I don't think Fred's calling this a contrived capture implied it was a rigged scene by some creative director. It is a contrived type of street scene capture that I've seen thumbing through lifestyle cosmo mags as far back as the '40's and 50's in my local library.

This one just seems to have an iconic vibe to it every time I come back to this page and see those legs and arm forming the geometric shape of a 4 like she's some pink flamingo. Don't know why bird references keep popping in my head on this one.

Thanks, Tim.

Just to clarify, I didn't call it contrived and don't think it is, though I can understand what I said being interpreted that way and understand your use of it in your description.

Ultimately, I felt unmoved by the photo, along with some positive reactions to it as well.

I don't tend to use the word "contrived" (relative to photos and art) in a negative way as I find much good art and photography contrived. I can't think of a better filmmaker than Hitchcock and it's some of the most brilliantly and creatively contrived stuff around. You don't get much more contrived than some of Serrano's work, which I love. I look at Weston's pepper and see contrivance and appreciate that aspect as well as all the other aspects of it. I play around with contrivance in my own work a lot, in hopes of expressing something real and true for me, kind of like theater. Contrived, to me, has a sense of forced and artificial, which can be good or bad, done well or poorly, express something significant or not. In itself, I wouldn't say something's being contrived is a value judgment one way or the other.

That being said, you are right, Tim, in that I didn't think of this as staged or posed, though it was interesting to read Louis's thoughts about that. I like and am getting a lot out of the various descriptions and responses this photo is getting.

By the way, Louis, it was submitted for critique as a street photo (which still doesn't have to mean it's not staged or contrived, though I don't get the sense it is) and agree that that's an appropriate category for it.

Pnina, one definition of mold is something you pour cement in, or molten bronze, or other substances in order to get them to harden a certain way. Idiomatically, when we say something "fits a mold" we are saying it fulfills customs or expectations.