'The Pedestrians'

In many large cities in Europe most travel is by mass transit, then by foot at

shops centered around metros, bus stops, and major cross roads, of the sort

here which attract these pedestrians. 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

In America the mom and pop shops have given way to giant box stores, people want to save as much money as they can at the expense of small business.

Excellent street scene, the viewer feels they can just walk in and take a part.

I appreciate your comment on this photo and the comparison between 'mom and pop' stores and big box stores.  This is Kiev, Ukraine, and Kiev has a huge share of 'big box' stores itself, including one giant from a French chain (Ashan) where the stores are big enough to hold two Wal-Mart supercenters and a couple of Costcos together for just about all your shopping needs.  I met the French guy who scouted Ukraine for those stores on a plane about eleven years ago -- in France, every city, town and village has one supercenter called a hypermarche, but with better bakery, charcuterie and so on, parts, just about up to French street shop standards.

In Ukraine, just like almost all over the world at older metro/bus/train and pedestrian crossovers, there always is shopping and here geared for the pedestrian shopper, as in Kiev's center, who has a car?  They're choking streets, but not like before the global financial collapse, then the war.  Most people rely on very, very good mass transit.

Taking a photo like this may appear deceptively simple.  Like the man, Jeff (whatever is his last name) who bought boxes of the negatives of the famous Chicago nanny photographer, Vivian Maier, he went out on the streets and tried to duplicate her work himself and found it incredibly hard to get just one shot that made compositional sense and was artful, and then had a true appreciation for the trove of negatives he had bought at auction from Maier's abandoned property in storage as she lay dying.

It is almost impossible to get people, strangers, to line up in a diagonal like this, then to color coordinate the scene like this so it 'works'.  It also 'works' in black and white' but it works better in color, and best in subdued colors.

This is one of those moments that Cartier-Bresson cherished as 'just so', and that disappeared in an instant.

I cherish it just for that.

And the same with your remark.  (Pardon the delay in responding.)

john

John (Crosley)