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© Copyright 2006, John Crosley, All Rights Reserved, First Publication 2006

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johncrosley

Nikon D2X, Nikkor 17~55 mm E.D.

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© Copyright 2006, John Crosley, All Rights Reserved, First Publication 2006

From the category:

Street

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No real caption is needed for this capture from a street in Buenos

Aires, Argentina. 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

photographic knowledge to help improve my photography. (I'll

explain it after about a week, probably) Thanks! Enjoy! John

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This is a 'C' sequence, what would previously have been called a 'motor drive' sequence, which came upon me all of a sudden when I left my hotel.

 

Ya gotta be prepared, with exposure set, white balance ready, focal point at the right place, proper lens on the camera, hand on camera and the photos come to you as you walk to breakfast or lunch.

 

And then a guy like this will walk by you, and you'll have 'NO REGRETS' and five or six great captures.

 

John (Crosley)

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Why this guy was like this. I'll explain in a week.

 

Ya just gotta be prepared, as sometimes the photos rush up to you and almost yell in your face with arms outstretched. What ya gonnna do but take them, or fumble with your equipment? I always have a camera, so I took it, five or six or them, in sequence (your choice might be that some are even better).

 

John (Crosley)

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This is one of my recent 'street' favorites. I've been getting more and more acute recently, and the ability to capture five or six of this guy, all equally good or more with this expression (varying expressions, actually but with upraised arms) has had a profound impact on me, since this was just me and him walking opposite directions on a sidewalk in Buenos Aires -- no parade or anything that I was aware of and definitely no nearby sporting event.

 

Sometimes life just walks up, smacks you in the face, and asks you 'are you ready for this?'

 

I was.

 

John (Crosley)

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This is one of the reasons I love this site! I'm a writer, not a photographer, but pictures like these are tremendous springboards for stories. His face is a story in itself. Keep it up, you motivate me.
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It may come as little surprise that although I started out as a photographer when I bought a camera at age 21, somewhere a year and a half later, Associated Press hired me (as a photographer) but made excuses and put me to work as a writer. My stories were going globally (as well as locally) despite my never previously having written a story or having gone to Journalism schoool, within two days. I was an instant success, though at first a very laborious writer. Now I can write like the wind -- journalistic style, though I haven't had a writing job for 30 years.

 

Regrettably, one cannot function effectively as a photo-journalist. It just does not work. You can't be gathering names, dates, addresses, etc., and get that photo. It just doesn't work at all, as I've tried. And the newspapers had restrictions, which I tried to skirt when AP sent me to a small bureau in Reno, but it was answering two mistresses -- you can't do both very well at once.

 

I'm glad you get such a pleasure from photos such as this. I just never know what I'm gonna come up with next. Just when I say to myself 'what am I going to do next' a guy like this will walk by. . . . and there I go.

 

Sometimes I can work for a day and not get a memorable photo, and I'll labor mightily and take 200-300 workmanlike photos, then something amazing will happen and I'll get 20 to 30 wonderful ones.

 

It all averages out, and more and more it's averaging my way (at least good averages for a 'street' photographer).

 

Hola! (as they say in Argentina, where I was when I took this) . . . .

 

John (Crosley)

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I had loose plans to go to Buenos Aires last Spring but those plans fizzled out. I was not very inspired by the guidebook images I saw from there. It seemed like there were about a half dozen "sights" that they all had in common and none of them especially interested me. As seen in this photograph it is the human factor that makes a place interesting and unique.

 

Photography does seem to be a statistical pursuit at times. Especially when you take photographs at all hours of the day and don't have the option of "directing" your subjects. Thanks for sharing your experiences.

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If you want to be 'guided' by guidebooks, you'll end up at the same tired old places as all the other people, just as people who visit Paris end up on those Seine glass boats, or New York, the Circle Line Boats, and other cities the Grey Line (or other) city tour buses, and visiting all the same touristy nightclubs.

 

I travel more freeform.

 

I just step out of my hotel door and wander, with cameras ready, and things like this happen. I have a rough itinerary, and I know where people might go, and sometimes I go to those places (and even may return), but those are not high on my list.

 

I believe that my cameras (and my style perhaps) are like magnets that invite interesting photographs and all that is necessary is for me to go somewhere, anywhere and expose them (well, that's a bunch of hooey, but you get the idea -- just go anywhere and walk about with cameras and if you have any 'sight' or 'insight' as a photographer, you'll pass amazing sights such as this).

 

In some ways, yes, the cameras are magnets for captures, because I won't stop for those without the cameras, and life will pass me by, and the cameras are my excuse for stopping to look carefully at life and to preserve a slice here and a slice there, perhaps for all time, or is my head getting too swelled.

 

Yes, there are interesting places in Buenos Aires, and they are 'must-sees', -- Caminita in La Boca neighborhood is one, and Recoleta Cemetery neighborhood is another (if only for the restaurants and the weekend market as well as for the fabulous cemetery - an unexpected delight), but those are something anyone would want to go see, and one would also want to go to the San Telmo 'flea market' or 'antique market' which can stretch for 15 blocks of crowds, as I recall, having viewed all that one 'fall' weekend.

 

A city is what the photographer makes of it, especially the larger cities where there is 'action' on the streets -- one reason I'm attracted to Ukraine, because people live on the streets, where I can photograph them. But even in small cities and towns (even villages) there, small flats and apartments mean people are outside much of the time, making them perfect photographic targets for a guy like me . . . and good hosts too, who are not dangerous despite a dangerous appearing country (at least to Westerners -- to them it doesn't look dangerous at all -- just normal).

 

Gary Winogrand, New York's famous 'street photographer' could take a roll of film a block (and often did, according to a forward to a recent book published of his photographs) but that was possible mainly in New York City, where the city is visible 24 hours a day and constantly changing (and very large).

 

I lived in New York when I started out photographing and wonderful captures were with me from the start, even one from my first day, first roll is in my 'Early Black and White' folder here. (Staten Island Ferry passengers)

 

And not much later (after I was in Viet Nam), I returned to live in San Francisco and there were wonderful captures to be had in that city also, and you'll see some of each city in Early B&W photos folder of mine.

 

ANY big city is the home of wonderful opportunities to make excellent 'street' captures, it's just what you make of them. If you're allowing yourself to be 'herded' to the major nightclubs for a night of cabaret tango and tango singing with burlesque (or whatever), then you'll be hanging out with the blue-haired ladies (old women tourists), and that'll be your fault. You just won't get this photo or others like I take.

 

I'm out with the people, and often the young people, talking with store owners, street people, bartenders, waiters, gallery people (who often view my photographs and we form a bond) and so on.

 

Buenos Aires also is a city of artists, and full of galleries with very low prices plus hungry artists and also leather goods for amazingly low prices (anything you want, custom made, almost anywhere).

 

And, if you stay in a hotel your whole stay, you'll overpay. Stay in a hotel long enough to get acclimated, then move to an apartment, furnished in a 'Park Avenue' type neighborhood for a week or more for amazingly low prices (it's winter now, remember but July is a full month for reasons I'm not sure of, though it's the start of winter -- maybe the Norte Americanos coming to visit, forgetting that it's the cold season).

 

Forget statistics, and just read what I've written above, take personal inventory to find if you're the kind of person who can take advantage of what the city has to offer (as I have) and find if you're the explorer type or if you need a guide (I don't use them, and often eschew guidebooks except toward the last to see how what I've found correlates with what the 'experts' say I should have seen.)

 

I had a wonderful time in Buenos Aires and feel I 'know' parts of the city after two weeks, and could go back and build on that experience and hope to return soon enough for a long period.

 

Maybe I'll bump into you there. I think you'll be a happy person if you get that far.

 

John (Crosley)

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I walked out of my hotel, which is in the distance, and walked less than a block. This man and his family were walking in an opposite direction and his face was flushed, and obviously he was having 'great emotion'.

 

I had two cameras around my neck, and tightened my grip on one a D200 or D2X with a very wide angle lens on it, and began to raise it in anticipation of perhaps something photoworthy happening.

 

Perhaps he spied my cameras, or perhaps he was simply overcome by something that was happening in the 'outside world'.

 

It turned out that many, many blocks away, there were huge crowds gathered in celebration of a special Argentine holiday, and this man and family almost certainly were celebrators -- the founding of the Argentine Republic, I think, but not its first Constitution, as they happened at different dates.

 

As I walked by him, I got four to six different shots of him with his arms thus and so, each one of them worthy of being posted, with my drive set on 'C' (continuous) which is the pressent-day incarnation of 'motor-drive).

 

For this to work, I had to have my focus point in the right place, autofocus on my camera pre-set for the range of the scene, my camera 'on' my ISO chosen for 'street' (outdoors) and not, say 'indoors' and color balance set for outdoors or AUTO.

 

I take those precautions each time I step outdoors and/or indoors. It takes a few seconds.

 

It's why I can, after walking only a few steps, get a capture like this.

 

If I had to fiddle with adjustments just for a second, I would have missed this capture, as he and I were walking past each other at a stride, and here he's realized I'm photographing him for several frames and turning so I could continue to photograph him -- he's proud of something -- perhaps his heritage as an Argentinian (drunk? I'll never know, but I know the Irish get drunk in the USA at every 'Irish' celebration, especially St. Patrick's Day, but the Argentinians seemed pretty sober people.)

 

I love this shot, and the other several shots, for their 'impromptu' nature, and that he fills the frame with his gusto and emotion.

 

That's about as much 'explanation' as I can give; in other respects, the shot is 'surreal' -- life often is surreal.

 

John (Crosley)

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