'Hanging Out in the Hood'

California's San Fernando Valley is 100+ degrees Fahrenheit almost

every summer afternoon (38+ Celsius), and it's time for shorts and short

sleeves all summer long. These youths from a one neighborhood walk

past the small downtown of what once was a desert valley, turned

boomtown, now scarred in major parts with suburban blight and some

major crime, all disguised by seeming 'wealth'. Your ratings, critiques

and comments are invited and most welcome. If you rate harshly or

very critically, please submit a helpful and constructive comment; thank

you in advance for sharing your photographic knowledge to help improve

my photography. Enjoy! John

Another moment in time preserved forever. The arms rhyme well (one without the hand, of course) making a triangle taking the little boy into account. I'm a bit intrigued about the inclusion of the bit in the top left. Was it to make the space not look too vacant? Some comments on your thoughts on the composition of this photo please. Many thanks.

Samrat  Bose,

Clutter is all around us; it is rare when we see something in a 'people environment' that is plain that is large . . . . and not cluttered.

If you're in the middle of a Kansas or Colorado wheat field, I guess everthing may look the same for as far as the eye can see, perhaps.

So many grains of wheat waving in the wind, and if one uses a 200 or 300 mm telephoto at largest aperture, say f 2.8, then one will isolate a plane of focus and make individual wheat grains stand out.

But otherwise, at a small aperture and if one gets some elvation, the wheat looks, well, like an endless mass, composed of individual stalks and grain stretching some distance, and if one aims the camera 'downward', especially with a little elevation, then one need not include the horizon -- and then that wheat will look like it goes into infinity.

Same for Iowa bean fields (boybeans, I mean), and Illinois cornfields, if one can get enough elevation to take them because boy do they grow tall!

The same is not often true in an urban/suburban environment.  Little stretches on forever, unless one gets elevation and takes photos of rooftops, or uses a telephoto to compress things, and then gets in the middle of a street (or where one can shoot down the middle of a street, or highway), and 'compresses' all that stream of autos, trucks, people and signs into something in which they all in one way or another, seem alike. 

Just like wheat stalks and wheat grains -- I guess.

But absent such things, the urban environment is a little different from shooting grain on farms or other rural/wild environments where one can shoot into infinity, as many landscape shooters do.

One must sometimes hunt for some 'uncluttered' area, but if it's the side of a building and is too uncluttered, then what is there to take a photo of?

The chance with such a building is to find some detail on the side; as here, the giant man without hands (they're there, but show VERY faintly.

If one finds a likely candidate bulding with building features (windows, fire escapes, fire sprinkler hydrants, etc., on them,  with some interesting arrangement of color, mass or just darkness and light, one can use them in a photo with the wall as part of a 'subject', especially when there are passersby.

So, when I spot a wall like this, I hang around a while, and see if someone will go by and from that I can try to make a pleasing compostion. 

There are a number of such photos in my gallery, some pleasing, some less pleasing.  This may please some and repel others. 

I look for compostion, as you understood, when you were critiquing -- you talked about  a 'triangle'. 

Cartier-Bresson kept talking about 'la geometrie' [no French accents on my keyboarrd] when he spoke on videos and film in those rare times late in life when he was recorded.

His art teacher, Andre Lohte, was a devotee of 'la geometrie' as part of composition, to the point where we find that when Cartier-Bresson would use the word 'geometrie' in French, we can appropriately substitute the word 'composition'. 

Not all of his photos (except for the frame) have recognizable gemetrical shapes, not the least some of Cartier-Bresson's great photos -- lines, straight and curved abound in some or even all o fthem, and they are not all precisley 'geometrical' in the American English sense of the word.

Perhaps in French it's more natural to talk of compostion as 'geometrie', but I think it was an idiosyncracy of Cartier-Bresson and his schooling under Lohte, who found true geometry underlying many of the great works of art past. 

I saw a kino (later, video) of Cartier-Bresson in the Louvre, explaining the 'geometrie' of a great painting, and he did mean it as 'geometry' and in the sense that the geometry he showed, undelay the entire composition.

I understand this was the Lohte theory of what comprised art -- it was composition underlain by what American and most other English speakers would call 'geometry' -- though greatly advanced.

I also look for 'geometry' in photos and sometimes in purely geometrical forms such as diagonals which split a frame into two triangles (or nearly so if they're not diagonals originating exactly in the corners where the X axis joins the Y axis of the frame at two ends.

Triangles, formed by a diagonal form an interesting compostion -- one rectangle (the frame) then becomes two triangles, and this three-pointed figure, (the triangle), while being entirely the most stable geometrical form, is visually one of the most unstable after perhaps the circle/globe.

So, when examining in a fraction of a second, any scene, I try to discern if there's any coherence to it and that includes the basic geometrical forms, from circles, triangles, squares, rectangles and so on, down to rhomboids and so on.  Life has no limits, neither does my photography.

Here, I waited across the street (or in it) in a car, window down, as I recall. 

In all but emergencies, windows should be down, and one should have electric window and know how to use them rapidly, on all windows, as the best shot might occasionally be through a rear passenger window, and if there's glass there, it may spoil the shot.   

With electric windows and good dexterity, one can drive and in two to three seconds roll down a proper wndow, then reach for the camera on the next seat, point and frame (it's preset otherwise), and nail the subject, often so quickly it surprises everybody maybe one or two more seconds, sometimes.

You cannot be reticent to depress the shutter release for this kind of shooting. 

Not too many shots will be perfect, no matter how good you are. Taking such shots and only taking one then moving on and getting anything good from one single shot per setup is exceptionally difficult.

I can do it sometimes, but other times I must strain or just 'work' a stakeout and be patient, and I am willing to do that until I get the best scene I can imagine.  Some scenes keep developing . . . .imagine one of these kids doing a handstand or cartwheel. I've seen such things. Cartier-Bresson has a photo of a kid in the area formerly known as Yugoslavia, walking on his hands high in hills/mountains.

Sometimes when you take out a camera, aim it and point it, and watch, things will unfold you never could imagine.

The chances of catching such moments increases with the amount of times you take out your camera and aim it, looking intently through the viewfinder.

When less bulky cameras if one is very good,  one can look through the viewfinder with one eye and with the other eye look around the viewfinder to see who or what might be entering the frame.

If you only catch an individual after they've entered the frame, perhaps the 'moment' you would want to catch has already gone by.

Look around, and sometimes you can see what will enter the frame with an open second eye even if the other eye is focused through the viewfinder.  It's a trick and only doable if your pentaprism isn't too bulky or wide. 

The D70 Nikon was great for that, and also some of the smaller film cameras with small pentaprisms.

Rangefinders have 'bright lines' so you can sometimes see things enter the 'bright lines' which is the picture area, and that is the advantage often of rangefinder vieweing. 

But in rangefinder, WYSINWYG (what you see is not -- necessarily -- what you get, and that is their drawback, and why I prefer SLRs and DSLRs to rangefinders.

It's special heck o use teles with rangefinders and now, try to find a rangefinder zoom lens - ever see one? 

And how would you frame if you had one on a rangefinder? 

Most people these days use zoom lenses now that they can be had with very high quality (not all zooms but the expensive and best) with special low dispersion glass an corrected for diffraction for light of different wavelengths.

Such lenses are relatively recent on the market, compared to the history of photography.

So, I look for 'accents' such as the swinging of arms, and if there's a geometrical shape, and an 'accent' here such as the repetition of the swinging (or down hanging) arms, then one has a step up and a better chance of making a serious photo instead of a 'snapshot'.

This will never be my very best, but it's as good as I could get from that scene.

The upper left had to be cut off where it was, as otherwise it led the eye out of the frame, so I made sure to cut if off in a sense where the darknesss would 'accent' and fill in the ampty space and give something for the eye to look at in a far corner, and thus hope the composition now catches the eye and causes it to engage a little more.  

It's hard to catch such a scene, and still keep just the correct part of that signage, upper left, with its helpful darkness, 'just so', so that it's not pulling your eye out of the frame as it would if the whole signage were connected to what's shown.

That's quite a task for such a plain looking photo, and really it's a lot of brain power tied up in a tiniest fraction of a second.

As Cartier-Bresson decribed (sardonically and with humor) his accomplishments, he called himself 'just a man who pushed the shutter'  -- nothing more.

Of course, by the time he said those words on film/video he was by that time a living photographic legend, so his very presence being videoed gave lie to his little jest as 'just a man who just uses his index

Excellent.

Thanks.

john

John (Crosley)

Awesome picture and awesome description what you focus on when you go out to take a photo. This could be a scene in great movie, like the movie Philadelphia has some similar opening scenes. Zsolt 

What an awesome critique, really.

When first posted the rates averaged 2.5 meaning I had  2 and a 3 from early raters.

This photo had a hard time - it struggled to get viewers; I think many felt it was 'too simple' and disliked the dark figure, upper left.

Or they just don't like my photo for any number of reasons.  Some people, I have learned, like kitty kat photos or pretty flowers and hate all else, especially mine which tend to be reality based, and not from some idealized dream state. 

Nightmares also occur during sleep, but some people deny them and insist -- publicly at least - that all's hunky dory -- or at least put up a happy face so no else will see their own personal misery, in some instances.

Not all is like that.

I had a horrible day; a friend and I were exhaused, a taxi driver tried massively to overcharge me, and when I refused, tried to assult me; and I did not get done with a friend what I had intended because my friend told me we would do our task another way - a way designed to fail.  And it did.

But I'm a happy guy, Zsolt. 

You, a woman named Svetlana, and a guy named Bulent all said 'hi' and thanks to me for taking some of my photos, and I've never met any one of you personally, yet in fact, I live my life primarily for the chance to show you and others like you, the photos I take, and for those who wish, how I do that. 

When I came to Photo.net almost all photographers kept secrets about how to obtain good photographs; I vowed to change that, for me at least.  I share most of my shooting secrets, and get many, many thanks, which in turn makes he happier and very personally fulfilled.

Thanks for making my bedtime a time of happiness- words I usually reserve for the woman in my life ;~).

Best to you and thanks, Zsolt.

john

John (Crosley)