Ukrainian Day Military Marchers

Selective Focus, epaulettes and shoulders frame this male secondary

student military marcher from L'Vov Ukraine participating in May's

first Ukrainian Day celebration. Male marchers participated as part

of compulsory secondary school military classes/female marchers

apparently participated optionally. Your ratings and critiques are

most welcome. (Please support any harsh or strongly negative

critiques with a constructive and helpful comment/please help me

improve my photography.) Thanks and Enjoy! John

Lots of neat expressions. My mind is going crazy trying to figure out what is running through their minds! I like the shallow depth of field. Nice capture.

Interesting choice of Focus! Rarely I saw photos with blur foreground. Nice color saturation and sharpness. Love the crop too.

Interesting composition. The one on the left has a look of defiance, the centre, sort of a blank, indefinite expression...the girl? She's distracted with thoughts somewhere else. One could almost see them as representing Ukraine past, present and future? Nice picture.

Hardy Djunaedi says it all!

Unfortunately their backgrounds and middle grounds also are blurred. "Shaken, not stirred" as James Bond would say. I would spring for an image stabilized lens, but somehow that just seems too easy, just as it somehow seems too easy to set the auto-focus point -- or to lose it in the hurry of a changing scene. Don't you all agree, that in the hurry of taking a hundred or two hundred photographs, you sometimes lose track of that focus point -- whether it's left, right, up, down or center? It can make some interesting effects, though. Sometimes, however, you can even plan them. Many journalists intentionally plan to take their subject in a crowd, with many otherwise distracting elements in the foreground -- say a bartender, waiter, or headwaiter in a restaurant surrounded by customers and/or fellow workers. The sharpness is the point of isolation, whether it's in the front, middle or back, so long as it's a narrow plane of focus. John

This is a crop from a larger photograph, with distracting side elements edited out through cropping. I saw this photograph and what I am exhibiting here, but was unable to take it by composing entirely in the viewfinder due to the choice of lenses (not powerful enough) and had to settle for taking a slightly larger image, then cropping down. The effect is the same, but just not as exciting as getting it right on film with no other possibilities, as I love to do. However, not much was cropped, but what was cropped was VERY distracting. John

This is great, John, and even greater on "Larger." Reminds me of myself during my two years of compulsory ROTC, which was always Rotcee to me.

 

--Lannie

This is a pretty 'old' photo as my current ones go, and from my first trip to Ukraine -- to the very old city of Lvov, near the Polish/Hungrian border, which is pretty well off the beaten path, except it's a rail line which connects Hungary (and therefore Western Europe which passes through Hungary) with Ukraine.

 

Interestingly, Stalin built his railraods on a different gauge than Western railroads, so while you sleep (or attempt to sleep), your train coach is actually lifted by cranes in the middle of the night and you are suspended and your train coach (and all others) moved to different tracks on which there are a separate set of wheels.

 

The idea, of course, was that a modern-day Napoleon (or Hitler or some such) could not simply conquer the railroads and drive his trains across Russia (of course a smart dictator would simply have built trains to accommodate a different rail width and they even could have been 'adjustable' gauge railroad cars . . . if planned well enough in advance, but doing so would have tipped off the Soviets.

 

This woman, right, was really the ONLY pretty girl I saw in Ukraine that trip, which then was a disapppointment, since rectified (one is sitting next to me as I write this - beautiful girl that is), and believe me Ukrainian women not only are pretty but also well groomed and well dressed. Woman at right by the way is about 6' tall and is in 'secondary school' or lower grades - age 16-18 - of university.

 

This was an unusual photo for me, and required some cropping to 'get it right' which is pretty rare for me.

 

I think in fact, I just missed the focus, but it came out OK. I probably was aiming for the first 'rank' instead of the second but got a focus point 'mixed up', but that is pure retrospective surmise. I couldn't have passed up photographing a pretty girl, now could I?

 

My best to you, Lannie. Thanks for commenting.

 

John (Crosley)

 

a clever shot indeed. it is always nice to see people in uniform who look like they'd rather be out of it and elsewere rather than where they have to be at that moment.

I seem to have made a 'career' out of 'different' shots. Thanks for the kind words.

 

John (Crosley)