Nina IV

This is assistant Nina, who helps me spot some of my best captures in

Ukraine and is my most severe (and most helpful) critic. Your ratings

and critiques are invited and most welcome; if you rate harshly, very

critically, or just wish to make an observation, please submit a helpful

and constructive comment; please share your photographic knowledge

to help improve my photography. Thanks! Enjoy! John

The blue colour of the eyes has the same tone as the green colour on the wall. The tunnel end looks as a glory on your assistent. You have very good contact with your model. If I should be a hard critic, maybe the picture is a little constructed. But it is a great image. Luck or talent ? Lets se some more.

Tommy

This really might be captioned: 'The trip to the dentist's office and pizza'.

However highly constructed it is just the result of walking by this particular entrance to a courtyard in Kyiv's Podol district where there was a pizza restaurant (which you eat with fork and knife), then the dentist (for a root canal for me). Ugh.

In other words, this was entirely impromptu, just like 99% of my other shots.

Really.

This assistant is my harshest critic and the worst model in a way; she insists that everything be perfect, and for her to hold an expression that does not indicate disapproval of the way she is being photographed is sometimes a miracle.

Here, she had approved of the way she was being depicted, and she still approves of this photo (others I have posted of her, she is not so certain about . . . and one she dislikes, she now has told me, though it is the highest scorer by raters). Live and learn.

In any case, there is good rapport, and Nina, who quit formal school at 16, has the intelligence of a post-doctoral student; always interested, always questioning, self-educated. I tell her if she had continued schooling, she would be a professor of this or that -- whatever she had chosen as her field of studies. She counters with 'I'm just a simple mother of two . . . . '

She's extremely helpful . . . . and a person I did not see the worth of at first, but as I've known her, I literally would entrust my life with her; unlike many of her countrywomen, she is not 'on the make' and is verifiably honest to my rigid requirements -- and I'm extremely careful about such things.

Thanks for the critical and careful evaluation. I'm glad this pleased you. I do more than just take B&W 'street photos' that 'tell stories' when I choose.

This is a 'street portrait' of Nina, looking exactly like Nina, though it is not as I experience her, because I take her considerable beauty for granted and connect with her personality and intellect, and her willingness to help, which is unflagging.

John (Crosley)

Yes.

;~)))

John (Crosley)

If ever I met one . . . . and I was a doubter at first . . . . maybe just another pretty face . . . boy was I wrong.

john

John (Crosley)