Woman in the Window, Odessa, Ukraine **

I saw interesting colors of a window and surrounding, walls

saturated by melting snow and went to photograph them, and the

instant I raised my camera, this woman opened her curtain to peer at

me, in midday, Odessa, Ukraine. Your ratings and comments 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

It's a wonderful shot. I'd experiment with pumping up the colors a tad, though that may in fact ruin the shot. I would crop the left side slightly to get rid of the piece of window frame there and make the drain pipe the main compositional element there.

I wouldnt pump the colors at all. Regarding the left piece of window, it seems to neurtralize the pipe, in a strange way...when taken away the pipe gets too much of the attention, so i think i would keep it. Fine shot!!

I thought about all of that, and thank you for your advice, but doing your crop would destroy the aspect ratio of the shot.

 

As to 'pumping up' the saturation (color) of this shot, my camera already was at a 'vivid' setting which results in a pretty saturated shot anyway and stretches credulity in any case; if anything I sometimes have to desaturate.

 

I like that one has to search to 'find' the old woman in the window (she may be far younger than I, but this is Ukraine) and that she is not fully illuminated for more of a mysterious view.

 

I have a second shot eliminating the window frame, left, but it's just not as good, with the woman at the window much more apparent as she surveyed me so I rejected it. I'm a proponent (as was Henri Cartier-Bresson) of full-frame street shooting, but I'm hardly so insistent as he -- he would NOT allow any cropping of any of his photos (except one famous one of a man jumping over a puddle at a train station).

 

Thanks for your helpful comment/ I'm not going to use your suggestions, but I did consider them when editing at the origin and might have gone your way if I'd had something else for dinner, maybe.

 

John (Crosley)

Maybe Atle, while I fiddled with my Internet connection which failed, and composed my comment, summed up my objection to Mark's suggestions better than I. I particularly like the idea that the left (orphaned) window frame, somehow neutralizes in a mysterious way, the drain pipe which, it is true, otherwise would absorb way too much attention in the photograph.

 

Thanks Atle for a perspicacious comment.

 

(And Mark, all comments are taken seriously, and as you can see, my thought process in editing included your suggestions as well, even though I ultimately did not include them.)

 

John (Crosley)

The 'saturation' of this photo is done by melting snow from a morning snowfall in late Winter rather than any manipulation in Photoshop. Although, however, the shadow/highlight filter was applied to this, and that seems to add a degree of 'saturation' to photos even when applied most sparingly, but then again, this photo was slightly 'desaturated to reduce those effects. This particular D200 camera is set, however, at 'vivid' setting for color -- certainly not always a good choice, but very good for this subject, I think, and when it's not a good choice, I just desaturate, but up to 38 parts in Photoshop. Other D200s or D2Xs are not so set.

 

John (Crosley)

This is the first of two frames -- I quit when she appeared at the window and I had snapped two shots; I was feeling somewhat intrusive, though I was in a public courtyard in midday.

 

In this shot, the woman is barely visible.

 

It is easily possible to make her very much more visible, and for 'rate recent', her lack of visibility may have sent this photo more to the bottom of the pile, since viewers may not have recognized that she was there, which gives the photo more interest.

 

But the less visible and more 'ghostlike' she is, the more interesting the photo is to me, and in fact, if I were showing this in a gallery, I might even print this to make her less visible, as gallery attendees would have the ability to see this 'large' and come 'up close' to see for themselves the pulled back curtain and her figure, however faint.

 

I think this photo would be in any gallery show that included my top color photos.

 

John (Crosley)

Ratings means little in terms of quality on a photo. They do separate the out of focus..poor composed...bad lighted shots from the others....but when it comes to artistic quality they dont. If a famous photographer had posted some fine art work..lets say abstract work...it probably hadnt stand a chance against most of the colorful landscapes photos on this site when it comes to ratings and visibility.

Of course, you're right.

 

And what viewer, who can't see the title of this shot, and sees it first in thumbnail will realize that there's a woman peering from behind this lace curtain, pulling it back.

 

She probably was a well-off woman under Communism at one time, with a large flat for her family, a sign of high Party status, and her flat inside may be pretty nice despite the outside decay (very nice and sometimes even fabulous Western-style flats in Russia and Ukraine sometimes require entering buildings through courtyards and unlighted hallways and stairwells strewn with impediments, broken steps and other hazards, that wouldn't pass for habitable in the worst sections of old Harlem or Bedford Stuyvesant in New York before any gentrification, except there is no major drug/crime problem and people come and go through those decrepit old buildings. For the uninitiated American going into a Russian or Ukrainian building for the first time can be a true act of faith in one's escort or guide -- one doesn't know what to expect as they almost all look like slums in America.

 

And this flat (apartment), and decrepit building, is in the heart of the commercial district of downtown Odessa, valuable property in one of Ukraine's landmark and signature cities (Odessa residents are more Odessa residents with 60 nationalities represented, than Ukrainians, they sometimes tell, and many have never been to the rest of Ukraine from their seaside city, feeling themselves apart from the rest of the world and certainly distant from the agriculture that drives most of Ukraine (they're a world-famous seaport).

 

So much culture to be read in just one shot.

 

John

Beautiful image - almost painterly.

That was my thought when I went to the wall to photograph it, then she opened the curtain and there was the photograph . . . .

 

Painterly . . . indeed.

 

Thanks for the comment.

 

John (Crosley)