'A Moment to Savor'

I've suffered camera theft, and there's a replacement campaign site.

Please look at this link whether or not you wish to donate, and feel free to share it.  I get credits with the funding site for your and your friends traffic with that site increasing its own publicity efforts.  Posting on social media will help too.

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/189642?a=944353

I'm most appreciative.

Thanks.

john

John (Crosley)

That's a slight difference.

The 'Street Photographer' may see as I do, see this as a profoundly viewable photo; others may simply pass it by.

I regard it highly; a special moment caught 'just so'.

Others may see otherwise or wonder 'what's he see in that?'

I'm interested in others' views.

john

John (Crosley)

Can you identify 'stairsteps' in this photo?

If nobody can point that out, at the end, I'll give it a try.

Hint, there are six different planes in them, but they're far from obvious, and they certainly are not 'stairs' in any traditional sense of the word.

john

John (Crosley)

On cameras; you can always try the lotto :-) They look like "what is this guy doing".

It's illegal for an American to play a foreign lottery.

Of course, people always wonder when seeing 'what's this guy doing' and sometimes an otherwise good capture sees that, and still the looks do not destroy it.

One of my all time best, a girl adjusting her leg in Dnipropetrovsk, a dog at her side, where her leg seems an extension of a wall poster of a football field stripe features the girl staring right at me, but I think it is wonderful, so I have no hard and fast rule against posting photos in which people stare at me.

If so, there would be no portraits.

When I get a white line (straw) and a white arm, in semi-parallel lineup like this plus so much other geometry lined up, I gotta take a chance on posting - this is a rare opportunity, a scene that never will be repeated and one with compositional richness, if one analyzes it thoroughly.

Ask me, and I can do it, now that the photo has been posted a while.

Meir, I am not kidding, this is quite a structured and interesting photo if one breaks it down into compositional elements, which is one reason I keep looking at it in addition to the obvious mirroring.

One has to look at a while to analyze its structure to understand it, but when one does, it has a seldom-seen complexity.

john

John (Crosley)

I did not say there was something wrong with the photo. What was the problem?

Meir,

I'm proud of this photo; it embodies values that I'm proud of plus composition that for me is to die for as well as the element of repetition which for me is eye catching.  But there are other, more obscure compositional elements that could be discussed as well.

So, you ask 'what is the problem' and my answer is 'absolutely nothing' in my eyes, but it has not proved popular with viewers, and perhaps its just one for those who see things 'my way' or just for me and a few aficionados.

However, I like it very much.

When someone asks, I may discuss the composition, which I think is not obvious, and quite structured.

john

John (Crosley)

Of course you are proud. So too am I sometimes but I have never taken a "really good photo" -RHL-  though I've seen them in galleries.

I spent several hours last night trolling through your work. (Sat)

It's BS that you never took a really good photo (if that quote relates to you and if the initials RHL relate to someone else, I don't recognize whom).

You don't need to fish for compliments.

Your work is really very, very good, and I know you know it.

I haven't seen, or at least I don't know that I've seen the work you keep in that storage locker, but it should be some of the most interesting, taken when you were taking more chances, and with your impetuousness, I can only imagine that you took some chances in those photos I haven't seen.

No need to fish for compliments.

You said it best when you said your work you thought was very important or words to that effect.

I don't think anything of the sort for this photo, but I do think I have taken a handful of really good photos, some with historical importance.

None like Bruce Davidson's black civil rights marcher with the word 'Vote' in white on his black forehead, but some 'very good photos' nonetheless.

Regrettably none are iconic, but such photos are rare indeed.

Some I'd put in galleries, and I think some day some may end up there, even if not during my lifetime. 

I was told three years ago many would qualify easily, and then given the assignment 'compare your best work to that being shown in galleries all over the world, using the links from 'art-support.com' to the photos being shown in galleries worldwide for comparison for the challenge.  "Compare that work to yours, I was told,' because I was then mostly unbelieving.  It opened my eyes.  Of course, I only compared my best.

The task helped convert me.

I'm no James Nachtway or anywhere near that caliber, but some of my best work is better than others being exhibited, (and so is your best.)

I'm more of a believer now for having done the exercise.

I was previously a total skeptic.

But I still photograph for myself, regardless; each photo also may be different, and I may switch from genre to genre as my whim dictates, and I'm not a self promoter, like, say the great Andrew Warhol who sat around with his model/actress buddies and dreamed ways to get his name in the press from day to day with publicity stunts and press releases, quotes about this or that, phoned to one reporter or another, or attending one or another exhibition and trading bon mots that the press could eat up.

I don't do those things, and from your little flat, neither do you I am sure.

I'm a flop at self-promotion.

One moment I do a landscape, maybe a rodeo (sports), then a nude, a 'street' shot or lots, portraits or several (on the street usually),  and then maybe an abstract, all on the same download.  Bird shots may be interspersed.

I have varied interests.

I'm a variant on the old Marine canard.

I shoot now and sort 'em out later, but it's not God who does the sorting in my case.

It's just that I shoot what I see that interests me, and I have great curiosity and a wealth of experience viewing images, so when I look in my viewfinder I often see 'interesting things' I would like to capture and maybe share.

I do know that except for 'street' where I have strength, the strength of those who aim for galleries is to aim for 'the project' as opposed to 'just shooting' and then culling.

Maybe Winogrand was/is an exception, as he shot, then culled, but that process has never stopped, and may not in my lifetime.  It certainly exceeded his.

On the other hand, I'm still looking at my first year's captures, (2nd time around), just found some work from the 90s on film (very little, but just understood some that at first look had confounded me when I discovered it), and I've only given the once over to most of my work; little of it has been looked over twice. 

I could post probably 500 pretty good photos just from shots I previously passed over I didn't then see the worth of that now I value highly.

It's a continual process, trying to understand what it was I saw in certain shots,  then understanding those shots.  Sometimes I surprise myself with my older work, and my new work too.

Your work is fine and technically it's exceptional, whereas mine needs some work technically, though I'm growing in that regard.  I always figured the first job was to get the image, and worry about what to do with it later.

Don't be shy, Meir, you know your work's good.

Galleries don't always sell stuff that's good, you know, they sell what's popular and collectible and/or fashionable with those who pay money.

I was making the gallery rounds with a mentor one day when a society maven approached me to donate a photo for a charity auction when I was at a banquet I happened on when my mentor and I had parted for the evening; it was a charity banquet, and the hostess was impressed with shots she saw on my camera.

I told the famous society hostess my photos she might consider 'gritty' and very 'true to life'; they might best be viewed by her for suitability before I started donating to her 'crowd' of bored housewives of rich and superrich.

She had wanted a photo donated for a charity auction at some big Los Angeles fol de rol, where women were donating time and money to waste their time to 'help people' or look good to their ultrarich husbands by saying they were 'helping people', but it really was an excuse to dress up, have fancy dinners, social climb, and spend money, lots of money.

'One thing', the woman advised me, 'I hope you donate a pretty photo when we contact you', she said to me, 'something that would look good displayed in a mansion'.

I told her she had best probably pass me by; my work was too 'real' for her tastes (she was totally clueless what art was, yet she was a doyenne of LA culture helpers -- a fundraiser extraordinare, a charity ball fundraising demonness).

In other words, a rich airhead.

She would never have appreciated even one of my photos, let alone yours.

Unless they already had changed hands for six figures, as reported in the press and our names were in some big league art/photo publication.

It's sometimes a lot of smoke and mirrors, who gets ahead in the world of art, and often times it's who repeats the name and the results of lots of promotion and self promotion rather than raw talent.

In a New York camera store, the sales workers and bosses literally spent hours going over my work and dissing the 'pros' who bought their very expensive equipment; but praising my work. 

Pros, they said they sold to, brought them bupkus and produced a lot of bupkus, they said (not all pros, but lots of them), and these salesmen and sales bosses all with photo backgrounds, had great respect for top-level amateurs . . . and they knew they weren't going to sell me a camera or a lens. 

They'd get nothing for buttering me up except the fun of looking at my images which they seemed to like lots and they looked and looked and looked.

They certainly dumped on their pro photog customers to me, knowing I had nothing to spend.

I hope that makes you a little relieved; it's all true.

john

John (Crosley)

John; than you for the browsing and compliment. 

RHL = "Good photographs like good books, are a resonant mellow old violin, possess a soul...A violin sings to you, a books holds a mental seance with you and makes you think. Even so a photograph can talk to you. If it is of the better type of photograph it not only talks to you, but strikes you between the eyes and makes you gasp for breath." Ruth Hariet Louise 1903-1940. 

Ruth had a short career and a short life.

Seldom will I put 'You' and 'Me' in the same comment or sentence.

But 'you' and 'I' have done some living, ain't we?  You've lived a very long life with promise of more, and nothing appears set to stop me so far.  

I come from a long-lived line, and heretofore all my predecessors smoked, which shortened most of their already long lives and ended up killing almost all of them, shortening those lives by who knows how much?

I don't smoke; seldom if ever drink. (who wants to be taking photos with blurry vision, or worse, to be ripped off because one's not caring best for one's photo equipment because of drink - not me.)

Here's to living a long life full of great experiences and best photos.

john

John (Crosley)

I've had my long life. Now I am it the epilog