Uno momentino

May 9, 2014

Sevastopol

unusual and interesting story.

Hi Konstantin

Nice street result. What motivated such an interest? Well done. Roldao

Wow, looks like a picture from sixties, I would say it's very well crowded:).

Thank you, Stephanie!

Roldão,

A crack in the sky ))

Vlad, vniamanie, ptichka    lol

Thanks, people

Love the similarity but subtle variations in the looks on all the faces. What they are looking at is left to the viewer to decide. Looks to me like Godzilla came to town and saved them from whichever of his enemies was about to destroy them.

I like all the different expressions, but really feel we need a title that tells us just what is so fascinating for these people. A procession of something or somebody interesting or important we have to assume. "Uno momentino" just seems insufficient. They don't look particularly happy either.

I'm guessing it's a flyover, and people might be reacting in various ways to either the military or stunt connotations. It's an effective photo for me. The crowd seems expressive as an organism in total. This is good in monochrome.

Great photo. Howard puts it so well when he talks about the crowd as an organism and, amazingly, the details are so well shot that we can make out so many individual faces and expressions. My eye and mind move with their looks. Konstantin shoots in such a way as to maximize depth and effect and I get a sense of crowd without the frame feeling cluttered. Good use of black and white tonalities to help achieve the heightened sense of detail. The ambiguity of what's happening is, for me, an important aspect of the photo. I don't wonder too much about what they're watching. I'm just in tune with their interest and their gazes. It's a photo that seems more about attention-to than attention-to-what. Though the photographer is facing the crowd, he also allows the viewer to feel part of it. This is not a distanced view. It's an involved view.

This is a marvelous photo for all the reasons Fred described. There's an intoxicating sense of immersion that I always look for in crowd photos, and seldom find as powerfully depicted as in this photo. So many notable crowd photos are really about the individual, or a couple of photogenic characters, isolated against an anonymous background, with the crowd merely serving as extras and bit players. Not in Konstantin's photo - it's a perfect moment of a crowd coming together as one, as a choir for a single moment, some singing a low undercurrent of anxiety, others a midrange of expectant surprise, with scattered piquant notes of humor and delight. As well as it works in the standard smallish web view JPEG, viewing the larger version rewards us with a more intimate sense of immersion. Look at those expressions!

What's the photo about? It's about being there, in that place, an exaltation of the crowd, an impromptu mass joined in a multi-part chorus, each participant contributing an individual, unique timbre.

Interesting street photo. Has to be seen enlarged. The perspective is unusual,as the faces expressions are so well defined and varried. They look at something up there which is a mystery. Some of the faces are lookng apprehensive,which enlarge the mystery,as well as the imagination.

Very nice PP in B/W. Nice chosen camera point, and well chosen POW.

hi I think its is not a proper photo like it is photshop. alice.

What I find most interesting about the image is how, almost in lockstep, most of the faces and the eyes are turned in the same direction. There are a few nonconformists, however. To me, this is a creative study in herd behavior; it's almost as if the crowd has been subject to mass hypnosis. Notice that most of the facial expressions are quite serious, except for a chap on the left side about halfway between front and back who seems to be quite entertained.

Excellent work, Konstantin.

But doesn't herd behavior suggest some sense of each individual mimicking or at least being influenced by each other? That's not what I get from this photo. I sense that each person's attention is being drawn to something external to the crowd simultaneously but the beauty of the photo to me and of the scene is that the individual is coming through so elegantly and vociferously even within the crowd. These folks seem to me to be in sync without being led by each other, each motivated by a common cause.

I tend to think of herd behavior as a negative, as did Kierkegaard and even Nietzsche, at least to an extent. As a matter of fact, Hitler used to rely on and exploit herd behavior by placing SS officers within a crowd to stir them up. Many crowd organizers have followed suit. Stock market fluctuations are often considered to be a matter of herd mentality, as one person is influenced by the buying and selling behavior of others.

Here, I get pretty much the opposite feeling, not that each person is being influenced by the others, but that each person is individually and simultaneously being caused to look at something grabbing their collective attention.

I also don't see the few who are looking elsewhere as non-comformists, which I would take to be an intentional effort not to go along with the crowd. Rather, there just seem a few people in the crowd who, very naturally, seem to be momentarily off in some other world.

Now, I'm not saying my view is right or wrong and that I could "prove" how I'm seeing this. I offer this to show how significant the expressions here are in providing not a specific narrative or document of what's making them look but rather the photo provides an empathetic view of human behavior, where the connection becomes so palpable that the viewer feels like s/he understands the intoxication though not its cause and can relate on an intimate level.

Interesting effect in all the upturned faces, but if I enlarge it I see a slight blur that is bothersome to me and the sharp and contrast in post and linear filter (which I think is applied) does not disguise it. I think I would have used a less dramatic pp. But I like the capture.

Huh? You've been down that Rabbit Hole again, haven't you?

Fred, by no means am I an expert on herd behavior. And any differences of opinion we may have here may come down simply to how each of us uses the terminology.

I suspect that your view on what constitutes herd behavior may be a bit restrictive. First, I think that a common cause can motivate people together in a certain setting to behave as a herd without each person being led by the rest. And by "behaving as a herd," I simply am referring to people in a group behaving in substantially the same way. Consider an audience at a concert rising as one to provide the musician(s) with a standing ovation in appreciation for a good performance. It isn't required for a few folks in the audience to tells others to stand and clap. This also points out that herd behavior need not be seen necessarily as a negative.

Perhaps my use of "nonconformist" may have been inappropriate, since all I was trying to do was to describe some of the behavior rather than to evaluate it. It didn't matter to me whether the behavior was intentional. It was (and is) a straightforward matter of fact that a few people in the crowd are not looking in the same direction as the rest; check out the 2 guys in the front.

A brilliant crowd photo. The unity arises from the fact that all the faces are looking in same direction. Photographing

masses of people is hard. Serge Eisenstein was a master of that.

Sorry, I don't see what is so special about that. If there is a procession or other startling sight, of course, everyone is looking, they probably are there to see precisely whatever it is. If you went to the cinema everyone would be looking at the screen - it doesn't strike me as herd like or somehow unexpected.

Robin: Ultimately it matters little whether the behavior of the crowd can be described or explained by appealing to the concept of herd behavior. We can do so just by noting that there is a commonality of behavior amongst the people present at the time the photograph was taken.

Un momentino I suppose in the first place. Something informal is in this noun, so this is not a drama but a phenomenon captured in the split second which otherwise would be missed. If so, it is a photo which nothing can substitute.

A little soft, which is fine. Compositionally kinda strange. My eye doesn't quite know what it's supposed to be looking at.

The crowd and the faces in it, IMO. The photo. All over the place. My eyes wander around the frame.

That's possibly the photo's main success, Fred. It encourages the viewer to keep looking, and looking . . .

Amen!
lol