I Love This Place

I took my cameras for a brief business trip to San Francisco and

stayed two hours. This is the first for a folder created for the

results. Your ratings and critiques are invited and most welcome.

(If you rate harshly or very critically, please submit a helpful and

constructive critique/Please share your superior knowledge to help

improve my photography). Thanks! Enjoy! John

John,

No expert commentary here, but San Francisco may be the best place in the world for street photography - so much wierdness all in one place. You could spend days. Very colorful, and well balanced, to my thinking. Out of focus foreground is just a little distracting, but does have the advantage of moving the eye to center. Always like your stuff. Cheers.

I spent two hours, and you are going to be amazed at the wonderful and varied stuff I got -- just amazed I think. I was HOT. And I never got out of my car. It's great for an article on the handicapped 'street' photographer.

 

The out of focus flowers are actually in the center of a divided 'street' -- Van Ness Boulevard. I used it to 'frame' the subjects, and it served the purpose well (colorful too).

 

When I first passed this scene, there was a black man swinging a golf club where this passerby is. I was unable to stop or slow down because of traffic without causing an accident, and when I went blocks each way to return, he'd just gone away with his driver.

 

But this was good enough -- I had lost a 7/7 photo, I think, though. No crying over spilt milk. I did very well that day. Almost all film as I have about 44 gigabytes of CF cards that are not downloaded -- full and no more digital shooting until I get my main hard drive able to accept digital files. (Thanks for the nice comment and rating.) Yes, you're right, so much weirdness, and I'm glad you like my 'stuff'.

 

John

I altered the logo of the retail store, upper left, red circle. It was distracting. That's the most digital alteration I've ever done.

 

John

This might have been more interesting without the plants and car in the foreground. Perhaps you should have gotten closer.

I used the flowers as a frame -- like it or not.

 

And if I got closer, I would have been creamed -- closer meant standing in the middle of one of San Francisco's busiest boulevards. Simply out of the question.

 

I would have been a news item on the evening news:

 

'Stupid Photographer Overstepped Bounds Trying to Get Up Close for Photo and Got Killed Last Night' is how they would have written it.

 

I don't desire to have that said of me about my own death.

 

Even so, I still would use the flowers and the car to frame this this way . . . it's a matter of judgment, and it's my call.

 

Even if you disagree, which I respect, and I do respect your opinion highly, or I wouldn't post and invite critiques.

 

;-)

 

Thanks for stopping by.

 

John

this defies regular associations. i love it!!! you caught the right mixture of deliberate and accidental. Very amusing and telling. I stumbled over here to find that you have many wonderful images in your portfolio. it is like mining visual poetry browsing here. Cheers, Lee

I'll hold this comment, from a great, dedicated street shooter, to my heart.

 

Gosh, thanks Lee.

 

Somebody understands my work, and that's enough for me.

 

John

The vending rack for the free periodical S.F. places this photo in San Francisco in case there is any doubt. It's a nicely contextual coincidence.

 

John C.

This is a photo on which it is hard to 'put one's thumb' about why it is 'appealing' (or not) . . . and I think you have done the best in explaining it . . . as 'visual poetry.

 

One can look at the framing, first, with the auto and the flowers on the center divider in the boulevard, out of focus, and then turn toward the 'subjects' of which there are really three or four, depending on how you count.

 

The subjects are broken into areas of filling what is left of the frame for me, and that may help account for why this photo seems to 'work'.

 

For instance, the man playing the video game (teeth blackened with marker) has an engaging look, and is wall graphics.

 

The man walking by is engaged and therefore connected apparently by his gaze with the periodical vending rack.

 

His upper torso is a separate mass within this arrangement, which radiates somewhat spokelike from an implied 'center'. (there, I've said it, it's a spoke with an implied center).

 

The 'ball' upper left, really is a store logo which I've manipulated so it's pure color instead of the store's name, and adds a separate mass.

 

Calder understood mass in his mobiles and they were very successful because of that. He played on the everchanging relationship between those masses. You can't do that with photography, except to keep exhibiting different photographs.

 

In a way, as critic Matt Vardy pointed out some time ago, my individual photos aren't necessarily stunning individually, but taken as a whole they seem to 'hold together' and form a greater whole which in corporate speak once was called 'synergy' and he called that I think a 'greater vision'.

 

Well, 'greater vision' or not, I think the words 'visual poetry' strike me as quite real for what I seem to accomplish.

 

And that is to squeeze all the interesting stuff into a camera frame and snap the shutter at the right time so that the scene is preserved in the most visually appealing way, and the 'interesting' part includes the separation of the masses of the subjects as here and such unspoken elements as their apparent radiation from an unseen 'spoke'.

 

Here, also, the frame is broken into two parts -- a rectilinear bottom separated by 'street' lines from the elongated frame of the upper half of the photo which almost comprises a separate photo, all neatly framed itself by the plantings and the auto front.

 

(Poetry class by the poet?)

 

John (Crosley)

 

The logo of the store (Circuit City) is beneath the circle, which I have altered to obliterate the store name -- it interfered with the photo.

 

That's the maximum I've allowed myself ever to manipulate a photo, and such Photoshop skills were nearly beyond me.

 

Well, yesterday's news was that the chain was closing all its stores and merging them with another chain owned by its parent. If I had left the logo unmanipulated, this photo would have been dated in a month or two, as the stores were shuttered. Prescience? No, just dumb luck. I reasoned that no one really wanted to learn the name of this store, and few would recognize the logo anyway. I'm glad I did it.

 

(I once changed the color of a 'red' building to neutral/gray, because it detracted, in a photo of a mother and daughter, as the daughter skipped down Odessa, Ukraine's famous seaside steps -- my other significant 'manipulation'. The building's red color took away from the redness of the daughter's clothing and detracted completely from the point of that not so well received photo.)

 

John