'The Stray'

This is the 'Stray', a lone dog as it walks along a puddle from a

summer thunderstorm under a train passenger pedestrian bridge

next to a busy commuter rail line, in suburban Kyiv, Ukraine. Your

ratings, critiques and observations are invited and most welcome. If

you rate harshly or very critically or wish to make a remark, please

submit a helpful and constructive comment; please share your

photographic knowledge to help improve my photography. Thanks!

Enjoy! John.

This photo may be a little gritty; I'll admit it is not the puddle jumping man at Paris' Gare St. Lazare by HCB, which is full of humor and wonderment.

This certainly is a different aesthetic, though I am not without humor (and even wonderment) in other photos.

john

John (Crosley)

This shot has a lot of merit in that it does give a good story. For my personal preference I find it a bit too busy and the dog is a bit lost with so much else going on. A tighter crop on the dog (and a bit more light maybe) would have given a much better image. My opinion would be a crop just above the building in the centre. Thanks for sharing and hope my commenst make sense.

I have evaluated the crop you suggest, and suppose it would result in a prettier but different picture, but that was not precisely my goal.

My goal was an accurate depiction of precisely that busy-ness that you suggest I avoid, together with the dog and its reflection, not as a subject, but as one of many focuses of the photo, framed by the overhead walkway and its own reflection plus the reflection of the angry sky.

To do the crop you suggest would be to create an entirely other photo. 

That would be artist's choice of course, and if you had been there, perhaps that's the photo you would have taken, but this is the photo I took.

I seldom crop and usually only unless I didn't have the proper aspect ratio for my camera/lens and/or a sufficiently long lens available to me to capture something distant so I have to crop to get the equivalent of a longer lens.

That is not a hard and fast rule, but it represents a greater part of why I crop.

I try to envision what it is I'm shooting before I shoot rather than shoot and crop. If I need to crop to create something new, I'd rather go shoot something new and chalk a 'miss' up to experience.

I do appreciate your taking the time to express your views . . . . such expressions are valuable to me to test the strength of my own views, and often times do reveal major weaknesses in my own shooting - perhaps yours has done just that.

I shoot for myself, but very highly value the reactions of those who critique -- the critiques here are extremely valuable to me -- it's sort of like a master's class when the good critiques start piling in, and good critiques are not to be ignored.

Best wishes and thanks.

john

John (Crosley)

Hi John, thanks for your response and please see my comment I made on your portfolio. Your response further reinforces what I said there and feel about your photography.

Thanks again for sharing your images and insight into your photography.

Best regards

Geoff

Thank you so much for the comment, the reply, and the kind comment at the  end of my 100 - page long commentaries at the bottom of my portfolio.

It is most heartening to find such nice words there.

john

John (Crosley)

Very good capture, mood well expressed, b'w is a logical choice since graphical content of the image. If the dog was on any other position we could  not have actually seen it, yet I think of-center position would be better. I do like reflections of the sky in a water that appear ominous...As of other members ratings...margaritas ante porkos. Best regards, vf 

Surreal space, surreal scene!

This is one of my most dark photos of recent time, yet it does not reflect a particular 'mood' of mine. I was just as happy that day as any other, and I just captured what I saw -- no special mood or attitude required.  I was not trying particularly for something dark and dank or moody at all, it's just what I saw.  I was not a Poe (Edgar Allen) trying to depict my dark mood, but just wandering about and this is what appeared.

If I'd seen something happy and bright, I would have captured that.

I found your critique well explained, and have little to add, though I would refrain from criticism other raters, as they do the best they can, AND most of them have little experience with such scenes - this being predominantly an American and Western European site.  The more crumbling parts of the former Soviet East are not within the purview of many of their collective experiences, though they are of mine, as are many beautiful scenes, which I also have strived to capture.

Thank you for taking the time to let me know your perception of this scene and how I captured it.  You are right about the centering, but the scene offered no other way.

Best to you Vladimir, and thank you so much.

john

John (Crosley)

'Surreal'

In fact this is within a short walk of one of Kyiv's priciest and best kept suburbs.

Surreal indeed.

I am not sure if you in your peregrinations (wanderings) which I have seen through your photos, have made it this far, but I do get around.

Maybe if you had seen this scene you might have dismissed it as 'unworthy' or just 'ordinary'.

Me, as an outlander or foreigner, I saw something more pregnant, and waited to take numerous photos, including this one. (I posted another one of this area, also, prior).

Thanks for stopping by, rating, and leaving your kind comment.

john

John (Crosley)

Very few people would take this photo.

A.L.

By all appearances you are a 'bot' or a doeppelganger for another member, and you have nothing constructive to add.

In fact, the comment you purport to add, in fact says nothing.

Rarity of taking means absolutely nothing - it can mean exceptional vision or lack of vision or nothing at all.  This is in keeping with the non-comment, comments that define your vapid existence as a subterranean so-called member here, a doeppelganger for another member, no doubt, as I have alleged now for three or more years.

Give it a rest.

John Crosley

A real member of Photo.net

I remember this setting from your other photo which dwelt on triangles and mirrors. In many ways, this could be interpreted as a continuation of that one, with the dog cutting across the scene after everyone else who appeared here earlier have disappeared in some strange world that was created in an instant. (Remember the man cycling 'into' the scene?)

This photo appears rather bleak and dark...like the aftermath of a terrible war when everything is destroyed. The dog here may be portrayed to be the one sign of life. And hope. And while cropping and making the dog prominent may be one way (according to Geoff above) of presenting this scene, if seeing the way I am at present, perhaps the relatively less physical prominence of the dog does make it a small, but important, sign.

You know I interpret your photos in my own random way. That is what I like about this medium....the freedom to enjoy a creation in one's own way.

Samrat,

My dear friend (and more), when I viewed your critique, above, I knew you understood this photo in its entirety.

Although I did not necessarily envision a doomsday scenario, I processed it for such, to bring out the bleak sky and the bleakness of the scenery.

Interestingly enough this is the very same town/city where Bulgakov, writer of 'The Master and Margarita' lived much of his live, there in Ukraine and he is celebrated by a holiday there, and for the main part, this is a very, very well-kept town/city/suburb, but the railway area is decidedly bleak with scale and advertisements on the pedestrian bridge girders, and the giant mud puddle growing in the soil. 

This is not Germany or even not so far away Poland which has been very neatly rehabilitated after being for so long a Soviet satellite.  This is Ukraine, which for so long was a main part of the Soviet system - even Brezhnev himself was a Ukrainian, a citizen of farther south Dnepropetrovsk and its party apparat.

Though when Brezhnev rose to power in the Soviet Union which he held I understand for 18 years, he seldom passed up a chance to make fun of Ukrainians, as he wanted to be seen as a Russian by those who didn't know, since Russians were far more respected as leaders.

Ukrainians always have been viewed as more 'second class' by Russians (and it's part of the Ukrainian psyche), and so many Ukrainians are US resident wannabe's though not all, and part of that is very many envy or at least respect US citizens (and Canadians with whom their country has had an emigrant relationship for decades that preceded the breakup of the Soviet Union.)

A doomsday scenario (with some sign of life-this mongrel) is a very good 'take' on this bleak scene, and one I endorse.

I'm happy to say that as of today, official, even as of two hours ago, my own situation has improved considerably so look overhead in a week or so and watch your mail in a week or two (books come second or third or fourth class and it hasn't been mailed yet).

Your feedback is very interesting to me, as this was never meant to be a 'happy' photo with smiley faces.  It was meant to be just as you have seen it. You get an 'A' again for photo interpretation.

As always.

john

John (Crosley)

with a great big smiley face for several reasons, which you helped start in motion

John, this photo does indeed bring to mind HCB's  puddle jumping man- that one is a bit gritty as well. I always enjoy viewing your work and have learned much from doing so. What stood out to me as somewhat of a departure is that this one has no people; the canine is in their stead. As with all your street photography and portraiture, I find this a very engaging and inspirational image.

Just to see my name in the same sentence or paragraph and compared to Henry Cartier-Bresson is a very high honor. 

You may be aware, if you have read here elsewhere, of how when I met him, age about 22 and shook his hand, then toured his works on display in San Francisco, and realized without knowing of him or his greatness but recogning it in his work, how I went back to Associated Press and gave up my fledgling job as a new hire photographer for them - hitherto my life's ambition.

I just couldn't 'measure up' to the standards set by that man who had a museum full of masterpieces -- I had maybe 15 or 20 good ones -- he had a museum full and a lifetime of work I would have liked to have achieved but he had already do it in a style that I would have liked to have called my own.

So there I was, a wannabe, in everybody's eyes, if I had continued, and the man who sent me there, a former friend of HCB, said 'your work reminds me of my old friend Henry's.  He's showing some photos over on Van Ness Ave' (the De Young Museum there, San Francisco's most prestigious then, which was full of Cartier-Bresson's traveling exhibit, which I did not then know was his 'farewell to active photography' as he retired.)

Seeing it changed my life, and I basically exited my photograhic aspirations right then and there, and thenceforth became an AP writer (they didn't want to let me go.)

He set the standard, and I will always be a wannabe, but I am comfortable with that now - now that I realize I was like a painter meeting Picasso who threw down his brushes who said 'i can never be like the master, Pablo' -- such hubris from a 22-year-old, hunh?

That's my story, and it's true.

My life in photography is almost defined in parallel with Cartier-Bresson's, and if I knew he had been retiring then in 1969-70, I might have stayed with it.  I took the craft up again seriously the year he died, but before he died. 

Just for fun as it is now and will remain.

Thanks for an inspiring comment.

john

John (Crosley)

John it is, in my view, better to have done soemthing late than not have done it at all. We will all have regrets about our life but we cannot change what we didn't do only what we do in the future.

As fellow photographers I believe we are fortunate that you did take it up again and those of us lucky enough to come across your work better off for it.

Thanks for sharing and all the best.

No real regrets about photography.

I had no chance with my meager output compared to the output of the likes of Cartier-Bresson and the Magnum photographers.

I had a job as an Associated Press photographer, but would have been sent to baseball, football and basketball games -- essentially sports would have taken up a major part of my life.  I would have become friends for certain with Willie Mays and eaten with him at his house, but that's small regret for me, as he is not my hero.

The decline of the pictorial magazine caused the photography greats to lack work and begin retiring, and I foresaw that, which is one part of my decision, plus there was no outlet for my work, of the type I wanted to shoot.

My better work sat in a box for about 30 years unseen by but all but a very, very few - maybe five or ten people, before Photo.net and is now seen by millions.

I had hopes for an 'Aperture' Monograph and that's all, as there simply was no place for my work anywhere else except if I were a teacher of photography, which I was unwilling to consider, as I did not consider myself a 'fine artist' at all.

I had no idea I was an 'artist' until someone knocked me over the head -- it really was the farthest thing from my mind, and I would have scoffed at the idea when I joined Photo.net

Really.

But here I am.

The thing that has changed, however, is that I truly enjoy my photography; it has no bounds - no limits, and I take what I wish in the way I wish with all sorts of styles and genres, which I find incredibly liberating.

Thanks Geoff, for the kind comment.

john

John (Crosley)