new -- color & b&w 'The Soul of Integrity'

This woman's visage (face) practically cries out 'integrity' as her bus

stops for a restroom break at a filling station in Yreka, California, USA,

in the wee hours of the morning, and she fights drowsiness after being

suddenly awakened to brave crowds at the women's room, then at the

candy and drink counter before piling back on a bus known as the 'ex-

con and welfare special' for a trip down the Pacific corridor. 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

Scrolling through the thumbnails,my reaction when I spotted this was that this must be a frame from the film The Color Purple....then,I read your introduction.Marvelous expression you have captured and the lady's eyes do reflect her state of mind.Excellent work....again!

Meilleures salutations-Laurent

You certainly captured the anguish in this woman's face.  I find that if I hold my hand up to block the distracting light on the right part of the capture, I am even more riveted on her face.  Also, that allows her face to "not be in the absolute center" of this otherwise powerful shot.

-Lynne

This is one of my 'landmark' portraits taken in a filling station where a bus loaded with passengers stopped to let them urinate and fill up with coffee, donuts, popcorn treats and candy bars and sundry 'novelty treats'.

I caught her just as she was exiting the rest room and about to enter the candy/coffee/popcorn/novelty treat line, and in the process in this film capture ended up taking a photo I'm most proud of -- one of my first portraits since re-entering photography seriously.

I loved it because the colors were so outstanding and because of the wonderful sharpness and clarity plus the legendary color contrast of the lens, an older but legendary AI Nikon manual focus lens, which was mounted on my Nikon film camera. 

It's the same lens used a few minutes later for another landmark (to me) shot - the photo (also shows best in color) of the wife murderer standing outside sucking on his cigarette, all out of focus except the red tip of his lit cigarette, the bus running lights out of focus in the background.

The red in this shot is from a 'phone card' vending machine, a sort of vending machine that has virtually disappeared along with pay telephones with the advent of the no contract cell (mobile) telephone.

I regard this photo (this is a reprint and rework in Photoshop) as one of my best portraits ever.

By the way, have you noticed ever that in ratings on Photo.net over time, subjects who are black tend to get lower ratings than those who are Anglo and/or Oriental . . . . one more form I think of a sort of veiled racism . . . . one the raters may not even know they are practicing.

I formulated that belief about eight years ago, and in viewing ratings since that time, they've held roughly true to my hypothesis.

Not everyone is so conscious of avoiding racism as many liberals in the United States; some in the US are outright racist and in other countries being racist or anti-Semitic is a badge of honor. 

In Ukraine and Russia the word for a black person roughly sounds like the 'N' word which cannot any longer be spoken by a white person in the US without significant criticism.

And people may say in Ukraine, as I've heard said by friends who don't know better 'I don't like Obama, he's a Nigger', and otherwise knowing nothing about him, and making the judgment solely because of his color and not for any policy or knowledge other than that.

I once was called by the youths I tutored in Harlem a 'Nigger', (despite my lily white skin) which they meant to be a badge of honor (and acceptance) -- the only white guy they'd ever seen besides the cops who allowed the numbers runners free rein and the sanitation and other city workers, including the welfare workers who would cut off their welfare if a man were found in the house who was 'able bodied', all on the assumption that he was a welfare 'loafer' who could support the family and just wouldn't because he was assumed lazy.  After all, in such families, such a man invariably would be black and most welfare recipients in a place such as Harlem were black, even many Hispanics as they were from Hispaniola or other places where being black and Hispanic were not mutually exclusive.

Thus generations of young blacks who were poor grew up without father figures because men were forbidden to be around the home lest there be no food on the table.  But the vast majority of employers would not give even an outstanding black man any sort of job, or if a job, the most menial, and then they'd call them 'Niggers' or 'jigs' 'jigaboos' and other horribly offensive and demeaning words, which we now know are 'fighting words, all without fear of retaliation, as that was a day when such racism was pervasive in the USA (and not just in the horribly racist South), and that was not so long ago. 

Moreover, if one acted offended on hearing such derogatory slurs, one was branded a 'Nigger-lover' (not necessarily a dishonor I figured) or in the case of anti-Semitism, a Jew-lover, etc.

We've made much progress in the USA, but not for everyone, and not every age group, and those in many other countries are still in the dark ages.

It's still considered, I think in San Francisco, near lawyer malpractice in a jury trial with a white plaintiff to let a jury be seated with Oriental jurors (which are in great number in San Francisco) if they will find out that the boy/girlfriend of the white is black, let alone have a black plaintiff before a jury with Orientals, (especially immigrant Chinese citizens) because anti-black prejudice so deep is historic in San Francisco's Oriental community, especially among elderly Orientals.  Youths tend to be MUCH more inclusive but are not immune.   This is not a blanket indictment, and things do change.

Racism is not dead, and in my view, the ratings system here has been suspiciously anti-black not just in ratings on my photos with blacks depicted, but by others, and it is an unseemly thing.  

It's really a hard thing to point a finger at and say for sure; one might have to intuit that, but with nine years on this service stretching to ten, I've enough experience posting to 'feel' it and I think understand that.

Now, as to your commentary; it's wonderful as usual.  You seem to have a great knack for commenting on what I think are the really good photos I post whereas some other commenters tend to like photos I am not always so sure of.

It seems we are nearly of one mind on such things.  (Pardon my musings on what may be racism in PN ratings -- it doesn't mean so much to me, as I know in the scheme of things ratings do NOT mean so much, but they do determine visibility to a great extent. 

However some photographers here won't post unless they expect high ratings, and so the problem becomes 'why post that photo if it won't get high ratings?, and the insidious spectre of racism takes another toll if they have their eyes on what I think I have seen in nine years here.

My best to you my enlightened friend.  (Thanks for enduring my essay)

john

John (Crosley)

Yours is a fine, helpful comment.

Here's a few words about why I don't image edit much or why I did not at the start and continue to do very little.

I agree that the light for some may be distracting.  I like this photo and 'as is', so I have not tried to 'improve' it by image editing such as using Photoshop. 

Truth be told, for years I did not know how to use Photoshop other than to resize images and the very most rudimentary of manipulations, and still do not use 'layers' or really know much about how to use 'layers'.

I edit destructively, but have little problem doing so. I make choices and usually like my choices, so no endless figuring out how to manipulate this or that layer, or tweak this or that, and forget about labeling all those layers as is recommended.

But almost none of my film captures have any editing at all; they're straight from the camera; most having already been 'edited' by powerful darkroom printing machine computerized image editors, or if scanned by scanners though sometimes maybe by Photoshop if I do have those scanned into JPEGs.

Often just scanning into JPEGs meant the images were processed during scanning, so I did not even realize for the longest time that my images even were being edited when printed and/or scanned when using a machine such as a Noritsu printer/image processor, though they used $100,000 computers to analyze images then render what they thought was the best jpeg for each image.

I realized different when I started to scan to .tiffs,  which resulted in somewhat different images that required some editing . . . . sometimes, but didn't realize that I could edit them for a long time.

So, most of my 'film images' are pretty pristine. If they didn't hit the mark out of the machine, they were never seen again.

This is one of those; taken from a machine scan that was processed and basically little touched.

This is just from a different scanner than the first scan.

As I've explained before, I take photos prolifically, and rather than spend hours on a computer exhaustively manipulating a photo, which then often reveals that it's manipulated and heavily so, I'd rather just take a batch of fresh photos, and probably one or several of those will be winners that require NO manipulation to be considered pretty good.

That's my way of working, and so far, it's worked pretty good.

If I only could shoot a few weeks a year and then were confined to home, it probably would be different. 

Thankfully, that's not the case.

However, I save my images for my old age, and if my eyesight holds out but my body doesn't and I can no longer take photos but still want to work on them, I have a half million to one million photos to sift through and rework with new Photoshop skills.

That should last me the rest of my life, and I'm taking photos still almost daily.  A trip to the market still is a photo expedition for me, a seat on a park bench for me is an opportunity to take a portrait of the person sitting next to me, and also be accepted (as that breaks the ice).

Thanks for the nice, helpful comment, Lynne.

john

John (Crosley)