This is where you end up when you go shopping with the girls

It's almost like a witty product shot, but the grounding comes from the woman on the left thinking "what is this weirdo doing?" Carry on, your sacrifices are not in vain~

Tony, this is a great, great image. Love the framing!

This is where I end up when I am with my wife!!

 

Your work is just too wonderful for me express in words!

this photo is just wonderfuly composed interesting aesthetic and even funny . great job . you certainly got it .

The reflection of the woman peering at you is what makes this for me. Wonderful.

The comments above pretty much cover everything I could think of saying, but wanted to put my 2 cents in anyway. Wonderful framing, lovely conceptual mirroring of artificial and real woman, beautifully captured expression, pleasing colours. Simply a great photo.

OK, I'm confused -- why do I not see your own reflection in the window? It does not apear to be an angled perspective.

 

 

Well Eric, you've sure thrown me a curly one!

 

My first inclination is to say that there is a plastic dummy between me and the window and that it is demonstrably a non-reflective medium. The yellow brassiere is even more non-reflective (although from memory it had a certain "transparent" quality about it, as did all lthe flimsy underwear in the shop).

 

My second line of defence is that I was wearing dark clothes that day and that they did not cause enough photons to reflect off the inside of the window to show up on the film. Now I can't be sure of this, as I had TWO basic sets of clothes on this trip:

 

(a) my blue jeans ensemble, cf. my bio pic (now sadly gone in the crutch... the jeans not the pic) and;

 

(b) my black jeans ensemble (still extant).

 

With my blue jeans I typically wore white T-shirts. The jeans themselves were faded (i.e. light in color), so with a white T-shirt one would have expected them to perhaps show up if (and this is a big "if") the brassiered dummy wasn't obscuring them from the window and making this whole exercise in finding reflections in shop windows pointless (which I don't think for a minute it is). However (and it is a big "however") if I was wearing my black ensemble, then I doubt whether, dummy or not, my reflection would have shown up (note: there is a woman's backside to the right of centre. She is wearing white pants which show up. Either she is the Invisible Woman, or she was wearing a dark top which DID NOT show up as a reflection).

 

Funny thing about my ensembles, I started out to travel light and seem to remember only the awful effort required to lug my suitcase up lots of ancient steps. You couldn't get much more minimalist could you? A pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Ah Ha! But then you have to add in the 12 pairs of underpants, six spare T-shirts, four regular shirts (in case we wanted to go somewhere suave), a bulky pair of warm track pants, three pairs of shoes (including a really comfortable pair of sandals, which I repeatedly lost), two towels, two sweaters, two coats (of the "lotsa pockets" variety), a pair of underwater goggles, a snorkel, swimming trunks, fifty rolls of film (in a Jack Daniels can for protection from X-ray machines), three thick aluminium foil baking trays (with more film in them), a portable GPS machine (Garmin), charger for same, notebook, pencils, various tissue-paper tablecloths from various Greek restaurants seconded as souvenirs, maps, guide books, a tripod, three cameras (one of them my wife's, but she made me carry it anyway), a day-pack, a pair of binoculars, my wallet, passport, tickets and Pop Dummett's Patented Emergency Bag containing: small alarm clock, multi-country power plug adaptors, scissors, assorted bag straps, rubber bands, itineraries, mobile phone (Christ! they charge like wounded bulls in Italy!), batteries and last, but not least, a film can full of sand from our first Meditterranean beach on Santorini (which I still have). I used all of the above except one of the shirts in the three months we were away. The only thing I forgot to pack (or perhaps lost, because it was not at home when we got back) was my beard trimmer: by the time I arrived in Hawaii I looked like some kind of Mountain Man from Colorado... definitely not the shiny-chinned Kaui'i type of tourist at all.

 

Next time I'm taking a day-pack and nothing else. So help me God.

 

Back to the (apparently) missing reflections. I'm not sure whether the shot was taken front-on or at a slight angle. I do tend to agree with your observation that it WAS front-on though. So I think, in answer to your question, I must have been,

 

(a) wearing my black ensemble,

 

(b) sporting a fuller dark beard than usual,

 

© holding a black camera up to my face,

 

(d) showing-off my prescription titanium-framed sunglasses

 

(e) obscured by a store dummy from the window,

 

(f) breathing in at the time,

 

or all or any combination of the above. When you think of the sight, it's a wonder I wasn't arrested (all this in a dirty underwear store too!).

 

What makes me think I was wearing the black outfit? Well, it was a cold day and raining intermittently, so I would have had my coat and my dark sweater....most likely. I would have worn them all as I don't trust Italian railway station carparks. Never will (sorry, Italy).

 

We had been following some "friends" from San Gimignano all the way into Florence at breakneck speed along a superstrada. They didn't know where they were going and all we knew was that we couldn't lose sight of them or else we'd end up in Pisa (or worse, the Cinque Terra villages... but that's another story). I would have been in a pretty grim mood, driving in the rain in Italy, where the aim amongst the locals seems to be to see how many hand-held objects you can manage (mobile phones, cigarette lighter, steering wheel and your nose as in "picking it") whilst proceeding in the (roughly) forward direction at 200 kilometres per hour, horn blaring and lights flashing. I doubt whether I'd have had either the time or inclination to disrobe from my dark jeans, dark sweater, dark coat and shave my beard off into the bargain. So forgive me if my memory's a little vague on how I managed to keep my reflection out of the picture. I guess I just got lucky.

 

Bloody good question though, Eric. I had never thought of this photograph in quite these terms.

 

(I do know I didn't Photoshop it out).

 

 

Im impressed how easily some people give their 10/10 ratings to this photo. Did that mean this photo is perfect or was that only flattering? Personally I dont think this picture is perfect. For instance I would at least crop the wall on the right because its distracting. For my taste I would even crop the right model completely. Besides I noticed this photo is currently at a tilt to the right. I wonder if Im the first one to see this or the first one who dares say this because Mr. Dummett is supposed to have a right to be arrogant on the basis of his exemplary photos.

Ellen, you can call me "Tony" by the way. I don't stand on ceremony.

 

I don't know why people gave me 10/10 for this pic either. It (or any other picture here) is obviously not perfect, or even near to it. I was hanging around like a bad smell in this porno underwear shop whilst my wife and her girlfriends checked out frilly evanescences. I had to do something, so I took a picture from the inside looking out (it was also raining at the time, and my wallet was required, so I couldn't escape).

 

But back to the 10/10 business: I've only given a few "10" ratings myself, and then only recently. There seems to have been an inflation of ratings values lately. Once upon a time (all of four or five months ago) a really high rating was "8", and they were few and far between. Then a whole lot of New Agey contributors came on site implementing very old fashioned ratings corruption by block-rating rating each other. It was also more embarassing to rate low, as your ratings were now public (this was after July 19, "The Night Of The Long Knives", when the elves awoke from their torpor and tried to blitz some of the more obvious cheats). Even this wasn't enough to catapault favourites into the limelight, so the solution was simple: up the ante by increasing the average high rating to "9" and then finally the ultimate "10". "10" in todays ratings currency doesn't actually mean "perfection", it just means "this pic is pretty good in my opinion". It's similar to inflation in the cost of housing. I have a friend in Palo Alto whose ordinary suburban house is worth over a million U.S. dollars, simply because people are outbidding each other to get to live where they want to be, and they have the spare cash to do it. If you want the property, you have to get on the elevator.

 

The analogy stops there though, because, unless the elves are going to up the maximum to "12" or "15" (or even "20"), "10" is as high as a picture can be rated under the current scheme (although, there are already comments around this site to the effect that some would like to be able to rate pictures "11"). There is another point of departure from the analogy as well: there is no scarcity of ratings "dollars" like there is with real greenbacks. All you need to have ratings riches beyond your wildest dreams is an email address (genuine or bogus), a log-on password and a mouse. Hence the incredible (and demonstratable) increase in the average rating for someone on the "Top Rated" greasy pole nowadays.

 

Don't get too outraged about my high ratings, Ellen (there are plenty of quite low ratings to balance them out). I don't take much notice anymore (of the ratings, not you). They're a load of hogwash (I say this whilst trying not to sound like I'm absolutely looking a gift-horse in the mouth), signifying nothing very much. They give me personally an idea of what people out there can relate to, photographically. The only reason I've awarded "10" ratings to some work I have really liked is due to inflation. If I awarded lower scores the photographer might get upset and think I didn't like his or her picture.

 

What's going to happen next will be interesting though. Since the maximum rating can't go higher, then everybody will soon get minimum ratings of "7" or "8". All scores, for pictures posted after that point, will be crowded into the (average) "14" to "19.9" range (whilst posted pictures of greater vintage, with inherited lower ratings "baggage", will sink closer to the bottom). This is what I meant by "everybody wins a prize" (recently mentioned elsewhere in another thread). I'd be willing to take bets that this will come about, and eventually the elves will have to do something about it, as the virus of inflated ratings, born of New Age "positivism" and outright corruption, comes ever closer to destroying its host.

 

By the way, you're right about the slight tilt. If you're looking for fault, you'll find plenty of it in my folders! I could have Photoshopped it out, but...

 

I have to say, I think your cropping suggestions are a bit too drastic. I was trying to see if the XPan "letterbox" format could work for candid photography, and I like the picture just the way it is (no offence taken at the input though)

No, she's ruined it for me Morwen. All I can see is tilt, now.