'Chatting' at Vesuvio, San Francisco landmark

This young woman is having a cup of coffee and chatting on her cell

phone (mobile) outside Vesuvio, a very well known San Francisco

watering hole. She is seen from a distance through a tele V.R. lens

under street lights without a flash, and was unaware of being

photographed. 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

(Part of a series, San Francisco in a Few Hours)

great mood on the picture, the light and her face are very expressive

This photo is indeed, very 'moody' because of the lighting, isn't it? The background with its mural and poetry is priceless, and I, as a photographer, had the good luck that this woman stood there for a very long time, talking, so I took a very large number of shots, (good for me because a great number of them were very blurry, despite a V.R. lens, since I had no flash and the max aperture at this tele distance was f 5.6.

 

All handheld at night.

 

Thanks for commenting.

 

John

Considering your limitations, great image! I would think so anyway, because it's very captivating and pleasing to the eye.

This is one of those images you don't know what it's going to do on ratings or critique. I happen to like it (why else did I stand there so long taking so many images, trying to eliminate those in which she was blurry, her mouth was blurry, the feet were 'cut off', or in which the sign was not exactly caught perfectly?)

 

It had potential, and I think I caught all that I could short of setting up studio lights and a tripod right there in the middle of that narrow little street across from her (actually, I was across from her, not only across a street, but on a far sidewalk with my 120mm zoom tele with vibration reduction working fully in the dim light and this 'stretched' its limits to the fullest (couldn't find my flash, all the better).

 

I thought about using shadow/highlight to bring out all the poem/mural, but after trying it, discarded, the idea, as I want the focus to be on the yong woman. Other views of her face were less flattering or her coffee was in the wrong place, etc. She was intently engaged in conversation and had NO IDEA she was being photographed, or studiously didn't care.

 

John (Crosley)

Well, you can see by the ratings that there is a wide variety of opinions, and the low raters never tell you anything useful, so you can ignore them...

If I ever need a cheerleader, I'll call you. But I take low ratings and high ratings all with a 'grain of salt' -- in fact, I rate my own photos myself, and even I have trouble placing this photo or ranking it among my photos -- it's certainly not my best, but (and this is why it's posted) it's interesting and very far from my worst.

 

And interesting in some way or another is what I regard as a necessity for posting a photo, and where the ratings come in is a wonder sometimes to me.

 

I have one photo that rated about 4.5/4.5 and immediately got 13,000 views -- Go figure. That one has continued to garner a huge number of views yet never got 11 ratings to go into my most-rated folder. In fact a large number of my best photography never got the necessary 11 ratings, in part maybe because I didn't mate-rate when that was popular (it's more shut down now than it ever was -- and I still seldom -- if ever -- rate others' photos -- I leave what I hope are helpful comments instead).

 

So, if the ratings are high, the photo will get visibility on the TRP engine, and if low, I get plenty of traffic in my portfolio anyway and the photo will be seen anyway, just not as much.

 

I have found over time that ratings are a 'popularity contest' and that is just that -- as a matter of popularity, this photo is not so popular with the raters, but that doesn't mean it is not a good photo as I rate them -- for skill and 'interesting presentation and subject' as I like to present them -- those are things that matter to me.

 

And if you remember from high school, 'popular people' weren't always the 'most successful' people.

 

Likewise, if one looks at dedicated fine art photo magazines, like 'B&W Magazine' one will find that few of their images would score well on Photo.net with its audience of (for Americans at least) largely of learners to advanced beginners, and those are the ones who tend to rate the most.

 

I'm fairly immune to ratings these days . . . even though it's taken a while to get there . . . and it's a good place to be. It's a sad thing that it determines initial 'visibility' in part, moreso for those who have less exposure than I've gained through continual postings over 2 years.

 

John (Crosley)

I've noticed those things. the only time I ever rate a photo is if I love it, and it has really low ratings...that makes me mad, so I give it a good rating. Otherwise I don't pay much attention to them. I never have understood the "views" thing.

Not every posted photo has to have potential for 7/7 ratings to be 'good enough' -- it's not a spouse looking for a lifetime partner and 'good enough' will do, if it's workmanlike and worthy, as I believe this is.

 

It's certainly interesting and more important to me, it's not posed (though to some it may appear to have been). I posted it here to gain views as it entered my folder on 'San Francisco' which has an extraordinary number of views for a half day's shooting, and a few more day's shooting will probably send it soon enough into the top 1,000, and with exposure it'll probably soon enough be well into the top 500 (after seasoning), because, well, it's interesting and unique -- no one ever shot San Francisco like that, although it's there every day.

 

And I'd shoot San Francisco differently every day of every week, too, I think, I'm so versatile and so sensitive to what lens I'm carrying, what camera, how I'm transported (or transporting) or just sitting. Everything's idiosyncratic. For instance, most of the photos in this folder were taken from a moving auto -- imagine that -- in just a few hours and remaining photos were taken in a few blocks on foot (I have soreness for walking more than a little).

 

So what do you do when a photo gets low rates? You lump it.

 

I know what's interesting to me because it's in my computer's 'upload' folder, waiting for the day I'm imspired to upload any particular photo, or a slow day when I can watch the ratings come in and monitor the comments so I can reply --in other words, a day when I'm not shooting (often late night or early morning if you watch my posting times, which partly accounts for low rating numbers, as few raters are awake then.)

 

The number and quality of posts also seems lately to be increasing at times, and the competition is good; I'm happy for that.

 

I know where I fit in on Photo.net now, after an initial period of anxiousness, and it feels good enough, so I can relax. I shoot and build my hopes and dreams around my viewfinder screen, not ratings. I do relish the critiques and love well-thought-out critiques and often get them by the bushelful, for which I am very, very grateful.

 

The critiques have helped me build my enormous Presentation: 'Photographers: Watch Your Background' which still is building and has between 300 and 400 photos analyzed and a healthy number of comments.

 

That means that the commentators have spent a good amount of time reading the enormous number of Presentation comments, which for the most part are distilled from the analyses of my photos contributed by members through their dialog with me in photo 'comments' after critique request, and for that, members deserve much of the credit for that Presentation's success, thoroughness and insight.

 

I get a lot from critique and if I get a few low rates, perhaps my photos deserve them or perhaps the photos are too unusual to be rated on an 'ordinary' scale and should be compared to the rest of my work and to some unspecified 'fixed standard'. Rating is so subjective it's essentially amorphous, and part, as you say, is whether you 'love' an image or not.

 

That's enormously subjective, and many wonderful images may sneak by before something that's lovable passes your (or my) scrutiny and gets rated.

 

My best again.

 

John (Crosley)

Thanks for the explanations; I'll have to explore your portfolio more!