'Racing to Beat Winter's Ice and Snow'

These extremely hard-working, orange safety jacketed Turkish workers

rush to beatthis winter's winter's ice and snow to help repave a major

highway interchange to help beautify the entrance to Kyiv from its

major airport for possibly hundreds of thousands of visitors next year

who will attend the World Football Cup Games, which Ukraine (Kyiv,

other major Ukraine cities) will share with neighboring Poland). Kyiv

also is rebuilding its once shamble of an international airport in

time for the games, but hotel rooms may be severely lacking. Your

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

you rate harshly, 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

It's a stunning composition which I would really, really like to see as a monochrome. Your shooting position contributes hugely to its impact. The timing is superb.The shovel angling into the frame is a great nudge...

Thank you for the nice compliment; I liked this the best of several dozen I took of this group as they raced with dusk.  This is a sundown photo, with steam and all accounting for the interesting atmosphere, and the shovel angles seem to add greatly to the composition, as you note.

I appeared at the scene several days earlier for an hour, across the way, and they all looked at me questioningly, but by the time I arrived this time they accepted me, so I just went ahead and blended in, with blessings.

I took a lot of photos; this is the best.

It's quite different in black and white because the emphasis is different after taking away the reddish-orange of the safety vests.  It's good too but probably wouldn't attract raters' attention though I like it very much, just not as flashy.  For me it was a tossup which to post, as both are good in their own way.  At some far future time here or on another forum, the other one possibly may appear.

Best to you and thanks again.

john

John (Crosley)

possibly...

Thanks for going to the extra, special work just for this image.

It's an attractive rendition; somewhat different than mine, in part because your orange vests show up much more 'white/light' than mine; perhaps Lightroom (or you) emphasized the red/orange/yelllow channel(s) more than I did.   Red in black and white generally shows as black, and orange generally shows more as 'dark' than 'light'.

When I rework this one up as a black and white, I'll remember from your work to pay attention to the red channel, [and orange and yellow in PS] which is not hard when desaturating in Silver Efex Pro, if one knows how to use the advanced slider, though it SEP does not specifically use 'sliders' for each 'channel' as Photoshop does, either in Adobe Camera Raw version, or in the regular Photoshop black and white conversion action.

This has been a very valuable lesson for me.

Thank you so much; it taught me something about this photo that had not occurred to me.  Even though I once already desaturated it, my version looked much different than your version).

Best to you.

john

John (Crosley)