Look Girls, a Good-Looking Guy!**+ *

This is a pure 'street' photograph taken recently in Dnepropetrovsk,

Ukraine. 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

This is NOT a manipulation, a 'sandwich', or double exposure. It is a single exposure taken on the street.

 

Just to clear up, in advance -- any possible suspicions, because it looks somewhat 'unlikely'.

 

I don't take 'manipulated' photos such as 'sandwiches' or 'double exposures', and if I ever did, I would make it very clear I was submitting such a photograph. The fun is half in finding these circumstances and capturing them; who wants to 'manufacture' 'street' photography? ;-))

 

John (Crosley)

I think it's a very nice shot. I have only one minor suggestion for improvement: The boy's head could have tilted in the other direction, to stand better out from the dark background. I took the liberty to play around with your shot, see attachement.

That's a good 'trick' but that's a trick that I don't do.

 

When I worked for Associated Press photos, as a photo editor in their New York headquarters, when I was in charge of foreign service, I often saw the domestic service (U.S.) editors 'flip' images, (putting the part on the wrong side) and I never did that, not once. I figured if the part was on the inconvenient side that was our problem and the subject's problem and we could work around it, and that we should not be 'flipping negatives'.

 

Similarly, I don't cut and paste portions of my images or 'flip' a head from one side to the next to make it easier to view -- I'll just go out and take a bunch of new photographs -- and maybe some of them'll be better.

 

If I were working with models on an advertising assignment, the models were long gone, and I had a deadline, I'm sure I'd feel differently, especially if a dissatisfied client were breathing down my neck.

 

And you went to considerable trouble, for which I am very thankful -- it was some work, and shows enterprise -- it's just that I shoot prodigiously and just don't fiddle around much with my photos, preferring to shoot another 100 or so, for every one posted, instead of those who shoot 10 of the same -- they're all the same landscape then they spend a month tweaking it (them) in Photoshop.

 

Not for good reason sometimes this is called Photoshop.net.

 

But I'm a photographer, not a Photoshopper -- though I am still instructed by your legerdemain, which IS clever.

 

Thanks.

 

John (Crosley)

great find John, congratulations! It's perfect that he's holding to his mobilephone,thereby not 'realizing' the girls beside him.

great catch. very fun image. i like his head facing the way it does. works both compositionally and conceptually.

Can you believe that I went there to photograph the posters, and he just walked into the scene on a wall above a sidewalk and walked back and forth and I just caught him there, like this as I moved back and forth to place him in juxtaposition?

 

Well, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

 

I didn't really 'find' this, it actually was something I 'found' as a backdrop and then the scene 'came' to me; it actually kind of got dumped in my lap.

 

'-)

 

John (Crosley)

The 'fun' of images like this is that when I'm in an area, I'll 'spot' a likely backdrop or an area for which I will say to myself 'I wish' . . . something interesting would be taking place there, but there's nobody there . . . just three wall posters . . . or five or six, and nothing interesting.

 

But I'll have it in the back of my mind, and then one day or another hour, I'll pass by and the scene will unfold and I'll turn into automatic, focusing and shooting, moving right and left to make the juxtaposition and zooming to place everything into the frame.

 

That's how these images are 'found'.

 

And of course, it's conceptually interesting . . . and there probably are a dozen other images that might have arisen depending on other passersby -- consider an older woman dressed in a headdress/bandanna and a heavy coat walking by covered with snow as one juxtaposition and the women would look like they're mocking her old age. . . . and so on.

 

It just depends on who walks by and how fertile my imagination is.

 

It's fun and I enjoy it very much . . . to do these is a special skill I think, and I wonder that so many other people don't have this skill (except perhaps Judy Ben Joud who's a master 'mistress' of this genre and a few others)

 

Best wishes,

 

John (Crosley

If you look at upper right, that's an air conditioner -- this is after all, a street photo.

 

And at his feet, on the walkway around the elevated part of this store foundation, maybe three or four feet above the sidewalk, is grass and snow from meager plantings, mostly untended (as things tend to be in Ukraine, especially in winter). Again, this is a 'street photo'.

 

I leave such things in my captures to emphasize that they are 'street photos' and never crop them out.

 

If I were preparing these captures for a Madison Ave. advertisement campaign of 'street photos' in some glossy publication, consideration might be given to more cropping, but PN is about photography and my captures are about reality/not selling stuff in magazines.

 

John (Crosley)

At first look I said, ok, fine let's go on. Yust another shot with poster behind. But obviously, I am back now. Great timing and composition. It just looks real. Great.

very nice photo.

I totally agree that manipulating photos to make them look like good street photos is simply not done. I took thousands of street photos and I never manipulated them. If they had minus points, I didn't publish them and went out to make one that works... like this one. I didn't know this site is called photoshop.net :) Not without reason I would say. Although, after looking very closely, I found some really nice portfolios here. It is not all fake.

Thanks for the compliment. Maybe I just captured one of those 'real' moments that can't be faked (warning girls!).

 

John (Crosley)

It seemed to me like a 'little' street photo, and I delayed a long time even in posting it . . . it's kind of a surprise it has had such a nice reception -- a pleasant surprise. I can take photos like this every day . . . almost every hour of every day without problems, so long as there are appropriate backdrops, and I am 'hanging around.'

 

John (Crosley)

One look at your photos, and you made my 'interesting people' list. Yours show great talent, and obviously you've been at it a while -- great control over exposure and composition. You'll find street photos don't get a very enthusiastic welcome on Photo.net, but yours are a cut above, so it might not be the case for you. (Are you shooting with a Leica perchance? -- just a guess.)

 

Thanks for the compliment and the endorsement. Come back again anytime you feel like a fresh view -- I try never to repeat myself.

 

One day it may be 'street' here and another day it may be a 'flowers', a 'landscape' or 'unusual faces' -- whatever strikes my fancy.

 

John (Crosley)

John, I really liked your photo and your comments on photoshop! Nice to see such an impressive piece of work that is the result of photographic knowledge and talent rather than store bought technology. Keep up the good work!

Allen, I have no problem at all with Photoshop and its myriad ways of manipulating photographs. I enormously enjoy seeing magazines and advertisements with their manipulated images.

 

When I take 'street' photos, that are a genuine 'slice of life'; however improbable they are, I don't want anyone confusing them with a 'darkroom or digital darkroom' trick or manipulation.

 

Burning in, exposure compensation, cropping, and other things that could be done by a darkroom tech are all allowable in my book; Ansel Adams's 'Moonlight Over Hernandez', (New Mexico) was the result of some extremely heavy darkroom manipulation techniques -- heavy use of uncommon chemicals, and therefore would fall into a class that would be equivalent to something that might be considered the equivalent of Photoshopped (the equivalent, mind you, NOT Photoshopped at all, as it was a genuine capture and very skillful).

 

And the prior argument was for analogy purposes. The great photographers who used darkrooms and printed their own captures often manipulated their captures if only to cup their hands to 'burn in' a particular part of a capture that was not showing well, or to use little disks on sticks, to hold back (dodge) areas that were likely to 'burn out' from too much enlarger light -- and thus they kept shots from being ruined.

 

One of my earlier shots was greatly overexposed due to faulty camera settings, and the overexposed negative was thinned using a solution called 'Farmers Reducer' which a well-known darkroom said 'we have it, but we've never really used it, it's at your own risk' - but it worked and the the results are in my portfolio, but I bet you can't figure out which one (unless I noted it in comments).

 

The idea of shooting 'street' in part is to shoot 'truth' and to have people marvel at the juxtapositions and the interesting captures. If one manufactures those captures, then we become playwrights or scenery makers rather than photographers, and the worth of the craft is necessarily diminished when a 'great' capture is made (not suggesting that this one is 'great' by any stretch, only workmanlike).

 

I do have one or two that I think are very, very good, in my Early B&W Portfolio, which you may have looked at, and if you haven't I suggest you look there.

 

Nothing's been manipulated beyond common exposure/cropping techniques and even then, not very much has been done. In many cases, they were printed without using any Photoshop at all, where they were film captures, and I spent a year in posting before I even knew how to 'sharpen' digitally, (though giant Noritsu and other photoprocessing machines do that when they print -- or maybe even save to a disk, I think, as a matter of course).

 

Thanks for stopping by and commenting.

 

John (Crosley)

great catch. just another look to think about . . .

As a guy, I've only recenly given some considerable thought to how much thoughts of guys occupy the minds of girls/women, and this photo is illustrative of that. (of course I would have taken it anyway as it's not philosophically-inspired).

 

John (Crosley)

Of course, just as everything you do, your crop makes sense. . . perhaps ultimate sense, except . . . it's a crop.

 

That's the only objection, if any, I have to it.

 

I considered it, but I'm a full frame kind of guy.

 

That's all. In fact, yours actually makes more sense from a story-telling point of view, although I think mine is more 'balanced'.

 

John (Crosley)

John, love it - when in NYC and I see such giant ads, I'm always watching for shot like this, and never score one. Too, my new "habit" is to do my darndest to shoot with the intention of keeping it full-frame (I may crop to 4:5). It's a very hard thing to do - it means unlearning a lot of my bad habits.

 

Re flipping photos, our in-house guy at the office tells horror stories about that - especially as a lot of my company's ad stuff containted his aviation photos. Imagine getting a call from Boeing complaining the widget is on the wrong side of the airframe...

Increasingly such large graphics are being used to sell things or decorate otherwise 'dull' walls, leaving us photographers with great 'big' opportunities.

 

As to 'flipping' photos; it's just a minor transgression, but it's the first step to larger ones, and you give a very good example. Court cases sometimes hinge on those photos -- they occasionally are dragged into court, people 'authenticate' them by saying 'yes' to a question of whether it's a 'genuine depiction of a scene' (for authentification purposes) and they are unaware it may be a reversed depiction and that may make a difference that, and in certain circumstances, may mislead the truth.

 

For example, flipping may result in shadows that appear cast at 10:00 a.m. direction instead of 2:00 p.m. direction, and if time of day is an issue, and if the issue of shadows is not argued by the lawyers who don't know of the flipping but a sharp-eyed juror notices the shadows in a 'flipped photo' justice will NOT be served.

 

Fact finders often make decisions on such small things we don't see. I once won a case on the date on a union printer's mark; something I didn't even then know existed.

 

Ya never know what's important until you start doing 'little transgressing stuff', and then it comes back to haunt. So why start?

 

It's not as though we were limited to say out 20 best photos of all time here, and that was the end of our photographic careers. This is an improvement site.

 

I started here with my best photo ever, and keep trying to get soomething as good; never equalling it, but getting a great variety of sometimes good photos in the meantime.

 

Glad you liked the photo, Christopher.

 

John (Crosley)

I like the title, but I interpret it as the girl on the right looking at me ;)

 

I took a candid snap you 'may' like, it's titled Jaws - in my most recent 3. Wish I could have isolated the main subject but it was busy.

Another incredible find/stroke of luck/apt reward for your patience/knack for knowing where the good stuff is going to happen etc...

I'm amazed at the "tricks" that can be done here, especially the one of switching his head tilt...that one really surprised me, but hugely respect your

"ethical" decision not to do it. I do however, like the thought of Ben (maybe?) as to a different composition/cropping of leaving out the girl on the right. It's stunning the way it is, but "story-wise" might be stronger without the girl on the left. (Don't think the black and white helped though, leave it color for sure (for me anyway)). I think you did well to include just a hair of the bottom... more might've been distracting, but less would've taken away context. Might've been cool to get another of him once he's done on the phone too (though these days cell phone conversations don't seem to have "ends". I swear, there's going to be a whole new medical field out there soon for shoulder and wrist conditions developed from holding that damn thing up to their ears all day) so as to give him more of a forelorn/lonely look that would've worked well with the whole "being laughed at and feeling small" theme. anyway, end of rant for now. Another gem of a photo, that's for sure

 

He practically invented stream of consciousness writing and did a wonderful job of it -- a sort of free association writing (a '30s Communist or Communist leaner who became an arch-Conservative later in life) who writes much like you have here. I also have borrowed from his writing style, from time to time. You might look into his works if you haven't previously.

 

Yes, twisting heads is not my way of 'improving' photos, especially 'street photos' but then if there were real money involved, we'd see about my 'ethics' . . . and especially if a mortgage payment were due.

 

Ben made a good cropping suggestion and I only rejected it because of the aspect ratio and that I don't take well to cropping at all.

 

As to the 'story of your life' or some such, I've had an identical story of my life and so have all but a select group of men.

 

When I attended Columbia College, Columbia University, an Oregon Goyim, when we had 'mixers' (unescorted and undated dances) with Barnard College women who largely were Jewish and largely from New York City (and therefore considered themselve much more 'sophisticated' it was a game for them when a man asked a woman in a group 'would you care to dance' to look him up and down and say 'NO' and turn away to her girlfriends and laugh a long laugh.

 

That'll chill a guy every time.

 

What defect, short of an open zipper and excreta hanging from a nose could prompt such behavior toward a buy who has shaved, showered, dressed in pressed clothes and even put in some light cologne/aftershave and was considered by his swim team buddies 'buffed'?

 

Of course, there was no defect at all; it was a power play -- a game that those immature women played; they practiced those games on young women and couldn't help considering if they worked on men too.

 

That's where Joan Rivers, the comedienne, got her training -- she was a Barnard graduate. There were some wonderful Barnard women, but a great numer who engaged in such behavior, and even from other New York City colleges, others who did such behavior. Wicked humor I think was endemic at Barnard College; I hope it doesn't still exist.

 

That's why I spent most of my freshman year with the women of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie three days a week, until I found Shoiley (found in my Early B&W folder) daugher of a Kosher butcher, whose parents thought I was Jewish (because I showed up wearing a yarmulke, no doubt) and we snuck out for ham sandwiches (pork), with butter (dairy) and milkshakes (dairy) -- Her parents kept strict Kosher, and she was a 'bad girl' with me, (in that regard only, regrettably).

 

Life continues, whether it's in New York City or Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, and some thing are universal.

 

However, as my stepdaughter, who's a little boy crazy at 13 suggests, sometimes the girls now pursue the boys, and there are no such whispers for the lucky ones.

 

; - ))

 

John (Crosley)