Passersby

These (two) passersby walk along under the streetlights one cold

night in Dnepropetrovsk (Dne pro pe trovsk), in central Ukraine one

night this winter. Your ratings and critiques are invited and most

welcome. If you rate harshly or very critically, please submit a

helpful and constructive comment/Please share your superior

knowledge to help improve my photography. Thanks! Enjoy! John

Interesting composition, John. The only way I could tell there were two people is from the dual shadows. What are those things on the wall - telephones or something? They seem to be two of the very same thing.

 

Always nice to see your work. Best Regards

Good timing John!

How could you even know this was my work? It's unlike anything I've ever posted or ever will post again. I'm the 'chameleon of Photo.net' . . . see my biography. . . .

 

Yes those are telephones . . . pay telephones . . . which may or may not work . . . probably not . . . but which will operate on coins if they do . . . and I've never seen anyone use them -- the domestic hard-wired telephone system in Ukraine is one of the worst ever but the mobile communications system is everpresent --- one is lost without one's mobile -- and everyone is talking or SMSing (messaging) always in Ukraine (SMSing is cheaper -- only one Hrivna pronounced Grivna) per message unit, I think as opposed to phone calling and Ukrainians are super at composing messages when you see them stopped anywhere. (this is a desaturation from a very yellowish -- under streetlight -- color photo).

 

Thanks for commenting.

 

You can imagine the reception I thought this one would get, it's so 'out of the mainstream Photo.net.'

 

Cheers.

 

John

If you know me, you know this wasn't my only attempt. There were several.

 

I am of the belief that you either get it right on the first attempt (or the last), and I think this was the next to the last -- I tried once more but came to the conclusion that was it.

 

It looked horrible in shades of yellow, and I concluded some time ago that if color does not add to a photo, simply convert to B&W and show as B&W or don't show at all, and where composition is important, show as B&W sometimes without regard to color unless color is an essential element. (much as you have, I think).

 

I hope you understand why I haven't been in touch, but will be in due course.

 

Regards from the home of the 'failed revolution.' (National Geographic's monikers, not mine)

 

Addendum: Miles on reviewing my images, I find I took 21 of them, all with the same basic idea and this was the 10th or 11th, and the only chance I had to get the proper image because of pedestrian placement/pedestrian stride, before I ran out of pedestrians (and the idea grew stale for my weak attention span on that very cold, but early night.)

 

John

I would have clicked the shutter a fraction quicker if I had my 'druthers, I think, but might have missed the stride.

 

So the choice was this photo with this stride caught in full or another couple entirely, but for catching them between telephones, I would have preferred them back a couple of centimeters (in physical life, not in my photograph).

 

John (Crosley)

I like the question that the phones introduce, the ability to communicate, but is there any taking place?. The fact that we can't tell due to the motion blur makes this all the more interesting.

You've moved a study of light and shadow and movement into a whole higher plane.

 

Now I have to sit back and metaphysically evaluate my own photo anew and my motivations for taking it.

 

I just thought I was standing out there in the cold with this useless box called a digital camera and lens and pointing it at something that I thought would be an interesting photo and now you come up and make intelligent comments like the above and have me all flummoxed.

 

Gads. . . . maybe we should call in the higher philosophers (or the lower ones) maybe someone with an unprounceable or foreign name like Wittgenstein or some such and turn this into a philosophy seminar.

 

(Actually it really is, and I thought only I knew, but it seems you snuck in there and learned the secret.)

 

John

I'd like it all the same, I often find I create things subconciously and only understand the true reason why afterward - or perhaps I just think up the paradigm to fit the picture - the end result would be the same in this case, a pleasing photo.

A good decisive moment... perhaps a taaaaad off as said above. Love the framing between the phones. Interesting interpretation above. Dare I suggest the incomplete triangle implies a third, not present person involved with them somehow? Anyway, very interesting image. A winner.

It seems comments about Brian's new ratings system are turned on their head with my photos. Lots of new, low ratings and few comments -- that's for the other guys???

 

Of course this is unlike anything I have taken or will take except for the two (father and son, I think), walking past Newport, Oregon's waterfront in front of a school of salmon (with salmon thought baloons above(!!!), which generated nearly 60 comments as I struggled with it, trying to make it viewable. (Photoshop didn't have Smart Sharpen then.)

 

This version has been sharpened a little, I think, even if I marked it 'unmanipulated', but still certainly not much as my camera was set at a high ISO. And as noted above, I took a total (in retrospect) of 21 photos, but there were few pedestrians and it was very cold, even if not snowy, like last night where it snowed all over Ukraine from Dnepropetrovsk to Odessa in South (I can't speak for Kiev and North as I wasn't there -- read between the lines).

 

And I'm not even sure if this is a man and woman/girl or what, though I think the person closest to me/photographer is a woman based on headgear, but frankly it was so cold I wasn't even looking, frozen fingers and all.

 

It's amazing being able to take streetlight photos that are well received long after sundown -- even some of my early film works (black woman at rest stop -- 'rest stop dignity' and on same roll 'wife killer' were taken at 2:30 a.m. or so in Northern California. Who says you have to have a 'Sunny 16' rule?

 

I just take a camera and shoot away, time of day or weather be damned. If there's something interesting, I just point the camera and try for it, with lots of rejects for afterdark work and unlighted indoor work, but what the hey?

 

And you are right, Ben, sometimes you start out with an inchoate process in which the full thing is not worked out at the start or when you press the shutter release, and the full story is not worked out until some wise commentator comes out and explains the (not so) obvious to the (not so wise) photographer.

 

;-))

 

John

Now you've got me looking for third parties (excluding myself) and triangles. Do you mean the large triangle caused by the building shape from the concrete structure abutment in front of them and the shadow to their rear being the incomplete triangle?

 

If so, I'm not quite sure how that suggests a 'third person' but I'm willing to be elucidated, after all, this is turning out to be a learning experience for me, and Ben, above, already has enlightened me plenty about my own photo and turned this already into a metaphysical experience.

 

In any case, raters seemed to avoid this, and probably happily so for me, as how can one (except possibly a philosophy critic or fine art critic) rate a photo such as this (or perhaps a fine art photo/philosophy critic)?

 

I'm not even sure I'd know how to rate it, but I'd probably rate it highly by my criteria, but I'm idiosyncratic; I invite you to peruse my highest-rated photos to see, and this probably wouldn't make that gallery even.

 

Some days I can go for days taking pedestrian (if you'll excuse the expression) photos and then one day I'll duck into a courtyard to take a photo of rain/snow soaked cracked and falling strucco and a window and voila, a woman appears at the window peering front behind the curtain just as I release my shutter!!! Voila!!!

 

And so it goes.

 

The point is, you just gotta press the shutter button, and with digital cameras, it's relatively inexpensive, unless, like me, you've got 25 hard drives full of failures in between a few semi-winners. (keeps me humble).

 

Now, where is that 'suggested' third person?

 

'-)

 

J

Look all over Photo.net; and except for something similar in my portfolio (by accident), I am not sure you'll find another photo similar to this, or anywhere else for that matter.

 

I take all kinds of photos, and as someone asked me long ago and they keep asking me daily 'What kind of photos do you take>' and I sometimes answer facetiously 'From News to Nudes and everything in between'.

 

I try to keep people guessing, as what's the point of taking the same photo over and over again.

 

As I once explained in portfolio comments, I just try to put all the interesting stuff 'in the frame' and 'keep all the uninteresting stuff' outside and subject matter hardly matters to me, except perhaps to avoid the hoary Photo.net cliches such as overdone macro shots, flower shots which lack originality (see my shot of a bird of paradise flower -- oiseau de paradis for a different look early on), birds, which I'm not set up presently to capture and which are done exquisitely well by many Photo.netters, and landscapes, which have no end of able practitioners.

 

If you sometimes see people playing chess against the clock, making a move, then pressing the clock button, that's kind of the way I take some photographs some times -- with speed in framing and composing when I don't have time to consider better options. I do OK in landscapes, etc., but it's kind of boring . . . whereas trying to capture pedestrians like this on a cold winter's night in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, composing on the run with whatever passes by is 'real sport' as far as I'm concerned.

 

John (Crosley)

I always enjoy looking over your photos John, I think it's because you achieve something I would love to, but for lack of imagination and, mainly, time, cannot.

 

I particularly enjoy leaving comments as I find your verbosity highly interesting and often amusing. Being a 'technical' sort, I often find my own commentary quite terse, something I can't help but think is reflected in my photography.

Something I think I have always done is learn the 'rules' then learn why the rules were rules and then 'play' with the rules and 'invent' things with the building blocks that the rules say I am allowed to build with them.

 

In physics class in high school, my teacher gave the class a closed shoebox with a cone inside and asked us to describe the object inside by its behavior which flummoxed everyone, except me -- I worked with it, moved it around, and correctly surmised it was a cone. No problem.

 

In law, I never worked for a large firm, although I clerked for very good attorneys as a student, and so never had the tutelage of large numbers of extremely good attorneys to learn 'how it's done' as they would pass down through a firm. Consequently, I often 'invented' ways to do things that no one had ever thought of, and because of their originality, often was way ahead of the game and kept people thinking.

 

I think that attitude carries over into my photography. You may correctly note that few of my photos (except maybe 'street portraits' bear resemblance to each other except, as critic Matt Vardy wrote, something seems to hold them together -- I think he used the word 'strangely' and very correctly, and he was referring to my sense of composition.

 

Early photographers almost always had a fine arts background and thus had a sense of composition; modern photographers often do not. Many could do well to study older paintings and other art works to learn classical composition, if only to recognize it, even if they are to 'break the mold'

 

In part, photography is a study of light and dark and of proportions. This photo is about light and dark and about proportions. The figure(s) are (almost) exactly in the center, but offset by the looming shadow going off-frame. The figures are framed by the phone boxes -- not as well as I'd have liked, but the best that I could manage without hiring pedestrians to pass by on command and my becoming a 'movie director'.

 

The structure of the wall creates an broken triangle shape, and there is texture not only in the brick/tile work of the pavement, but also in the concrete and/or stucco (they're really the same thing) of the building wall.

 

And just as the right side of the triangle is within the frame and the base of the building exceeds the triangular part of the building structure, so does the triangle to the left, similarly or in a corollary manner, exceed the photo frame to the left (though not in the proportions I would choose exactly, which is why this is far from a perfect photo).

 

What I've done here, is just take my natural curiosity, and do something with light, dark and proportions that I haven't done before and probably will never do again and have never seen done (that I can recall) and 'create' something. I took the 'building blocks' of this craft and in a few instants came up with a relatively new creation, then walked down the street and tried something else entirely.

 

That's the magic of this craft/avocation for me and what keeps me interested -- one can break it down into its basics and then create from there.

 

I met a photographer recently who did studio work and he was quite good at it, having mastered his 'three studio lights' but he was absolutely helpless on the street where he didn't have his three ligths, and he marveled at my photos.

 

I looked at his lights and marveled at how he could work with studio lights, since I have only done so a very few times, yet I went into his studio and with one new amateur model produced a minor masterpiece in her eyes, for which she kissed me and thanked me and will surely tell all her relatives and friends. He never had produced such a product, yet with standard portraiture he was quite good; but he had learned by rote instead of by inspiration, and by copying rather than learning by wondering how to take it apart and put it together differently from the same pieces.

 

Someone recently asked me (naiively I thought until I reflected), 'How do you get wisdom' and my answer was 'You go though life and you make thousands of mistakes, but you don't shut your eyes to your mistakes, you keep them open and recognize them, and then as you recognize them you try to visualize how to keep from making them in some future or idealized life -- When you can do that, the result is wisdom.'

 

The same for photography. You take photographs -- lots and lots of them (I have 25 hard drives of them) making mistake after mistake, being human all the time, but learning from each shot, until after all (and for my latest incarnation it's been a scant 2 years), each shot comes more naturally.

 

Some photographers don't have to work at it at all and others never will get it, but like Tiger Woods who has natural talent galore, he still works the greens and the fairways hard no matter how much talent he has -- for golf, too, is a game of mistakes.

 

No one puts the ball in the hole the first time more than once or twice (or so) a lifetime.

 

Street photography is very much akin to golf (much as I hate sports metaphors). You take your equipment, go out and keep working at it, and sooner or later your score improves or you cease to work at it and start buying equipment claiming it will improve your 'game'.

 

I am of the opinion that anyone with a rudimentary 35-year-old film outfit and a decent 50mm lens can take world class images, though not so often or so quickly as with modern equipment. I know when I started out, that's how I did it and I still look back on my early work as some of my best.

 

John (Crosley)

 

© 2006, all rights reserved

Sage words. I intend to try and shoot more street work, I just still find it very daunting no matter the allure. There's only one remedy, and that's to go out and do.

Ben, get a tele zoom and do some street portraiture, from a distance where folks are busy and can ignore you or other work where you don't have to stick your camera in their face, and you'll probably feel more comfortable.

 

These folks here had no idea they were being photographed as many of my subjects similarly have no idea.

 

Another part have a clear idea, since they have a camera sticking up their nostrils and some are begging me 'take my photo, please'. Then you got 'em. They can hardly say they didn't expect the lens to come close then.

 

John

I've got a Sigma 70-200 f/2.8, it's not very innocuous - I think that's the part I'm having the hardest time overcoming. I've done a little bit of drive by shooting with my 400 5.6L, that was a lot of fun, I just need to get about more now. Take a peek at this one http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=4184900 The timing/framing was off but I had fun all the same.

 

Having 2 young children around means my time out is limited, I'm sure I'll become more effective at using it with practice.

I'd go with the 70~200 mm f. 2.8, which will serve you well until like many Sigma lenses it falls apart because optically it will bring in enough light for those low-light overcast winter days and early evenings with overcast cloud situations where you need all the light you can muster.

 

And as to your photo with 'polar' ratings, I'm of the opinion, it wasn't politics, but framing, and that the intervening fiture and capturing the moment just a little too late hurt the figure and you needed to stick around and catch the figure just below former P.M. Harold Wilson's left (as viewed) leg, in a corollary but opposite fashion as Wilson is framed for the full impact (without the intervening figure) and possibly as a black and white photo, desaturating probably in channel mixer. My rule is 'where color is not essential or doesn't add to a photo, desaturate and make it black and white' and simply check that monochrome box in Photoshop channel mixer and play with the color channel sliders. But go back and try to get a better frame first, or work with something better to start with.

 

However, your visualization (previsualization) was proper -- there's nothing wrong at all with the idea behind it except you didn't snap the shutter fast enough and there was an intervening figure to help mess up the shot. I'd have stayed around and prayed for better, but that's what the 'critique' forum is all about.

 

(notice I don't rate but critique extensively where I do critique, and honestly, without regard to anything but photographic excellence.)

 

My best wishes.

 

John (Crosley)

Thanks for taking the time John, it's much appreciated.

great and cool, John! :)

It's in Ukraine -- in Dnepropetrovsk, but part of the former Soviet Union -- your former neighbors and cousins. Does it look familiar with the same telephones as on the walls near where you live I bet?

 

Best to you, Rusla,

 

John (Crosley)

Absolutely, Yes. A dramatic hit on me.

 

Luca

 

[This one is absolutely incredible, but I don't want to describe it, I don't think this is neither necessary nor helpful]

Both are hung up on this one.

 

As am I.

 

I liked it enough to post it.

 

He called it 'absolutely fabulous' -- an 'original John Crosley' -- what I can do or have done that no one else ever has or ever will.

 

I don't think THAT highly of it, but I like it very, very much nevertheless.

 

I just carry a camera with me at all times and when I see something interesting, day or night, indoors or outdoors, I release the shutter.

 

(this one took a little bit of anticipation, but not much, as I'm pretty quick between recognizing a situation and setting up my shot . . . .)

 

Now, as you can read above, this took a few efforts, but it was well worth the wait.

 

Thanks, Luca, you are a very big help with your demonstrably good opinions.

 

I am learning they are nearly 'solid gold', in their merit. Yours are among the most solid critiques involving pure photographic merit I ever have received.

 

Please do not tire of this task.

 

I only fear we will soon run out of photos that you find interesting.

 

John (Crosley)

Hi John

 

Don't be afraid, I will not stop looking and feeling!

And I am sure that you will keep on producing excellent photos.

You have a fast and imaginative eye, a masterful technique (I wonder whether most people are aware of how difficult your photos are).

 

I will propose you an analogism: I have recently started to play golf, I badly need exercise and I like it. My instructor told me: Just think of each strike at a time. When you swing, don't think of the previous ball and not of the following. This might happen to photography, too.

 

I'm not posting much, these days, because I have some rolls to be developed and then I have not yet purchased my film scanner, which I will do early next year.

 

But I am navigating PN and trying to train my eye as well as my capability to "feel", so don't worry. I am absolutely sure that you will keep on proposing marvellous shots.

 

Take care and happy New Year in all terms: photographic and personal!

 

Luca