black and white: then to now Respite From the Rain

'Any Port in a Storm' or in this case, any window sill for a young

man caught in a thundershower. 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

John, this is an awesome shot, you've captured the mood, weather, expression and everything else all in one image. Well seen and captured. Thanks for sharing., chris

I've been looking at this shot for some time, and thinking the same thing, but Photo.netters are a sometimes extraordinary and sometimes fickle lot.

 

Sometimes they can spot an extraordinary shot and see it, and other times they just can pass it by.

 

This is among my best, for reasons you stated -- notice that it leads my best folder, my 'Early B&W (including Recent Work) folder, which has some of my most treasured work which compliments my single photo color work -- and both have some of my absolutely best work ever. If you want to see what I'm capable of at my best, those are the folders where you should head.

 

But who knows about the raters -- I haven't looked; never do until later.

 

All critiques are answered 'blind' without reference to ratings that may have appeared.

 

Addendum: Chris, I went back late and looked at your rate. It was somewhere near where I'd place this photo in my own little world, but then it's my own little world and I take photos for myself and don't expect other to share that place. I read photo magazines such as B&W and various other magazines, view photo books when I can on the shelves of the local Borders and Barnes and Noble (and mom and pop bookstores) and marvel at the wonderful old magazine photographers and their output.

 

I think I would have been more at home with them; it was viewing their work as I grew up, I finally realized, that gave me my photographic education -- I just didn't realize it until recently.

 

This particular photograph is more on a line with what the 'old guys' whom I admired so much (names withheld) would take, I think, and is one reason I like it so much. Maybe, however, we're a group of two. . . .

 

John (Crosley)

Notice, other face(s) in the doorway, far down the building or at the next building, also 'in from the rain'.

 

And notice the photographer, who was wearing a shirt only, too dumb to come in from the rain.

 

The photographer, in this instance, was a stupid kind of guy who'd rather get rained on and soaked to the skin, to come back with a photo like this, than keep dry. Are there extra points for that or another rating category for being 'mule stubborn'?

 

John (Crosley) ;-))

There are obscurely three 'Vs' in this composition.

 

Almost nobody would notice them, but they really are there, and may help the composition. You be the judge.

 

The legs of the walker, left, form a 'V'.

 

The vanishing point of the wide sidewalk as it recedes into the distance, forms a 'V'.

 

The thigh and calf of the boy join at his knee to form a 'V'.

 

Too far fetched?

 

I'm not sure.

 

Again, you be the judge. That's what the critique requests are all about.

 

But there are no 'Waldos' so far as I can tell.

 

John (Crosley)

Any comments about the exposure and/or reproduction on this one.

 

How to improve it, if nothing else.

 

John (Crosley)

Very nice overall tone and composition. I like it. I see several vees ...start from the bottom right and work diagonally up and left. Squinting helps...especially at this hour.LOL Good work!

 

D

Well, the doorfront stone, just below and in front of his hands is a four-sided figure, but not equilateral, and in its obtuse angles are a variety of 'Vs'. Am I on the right path? Of course, more obscure, the 'V' where his calves meet his feet, but I figured from the start that was too obscure and not significant compositionally.

 

There's just something for me appealing about this photo -- it grows on me, and I think it's one of those 'clickable' ones -- one that people will 'click on' just to have a better look if only to see his expression.

 

Time will tell.

 

Thanks David; Photo.net doesn't have to be all dour and serious, even for a very 'serious' photo like this (one with serious aspirations at least).

 

John (Crosley)

People have asked me why I go to this place with the hard to pronounce name. Well, in the course of going to Ukraine, where I went once on a train from Hungary, I got hooked on the people who live on the street.

 

I went to an old, historic city, Lvov, and found the handsome people there with beautiful buildings and all very historic but reminiscent of my days in Russia -- they were part of the U.S.S.R. -- but at my hotel they told me not to speak Russian.

 

Say 'tak tak tak' not 'da, da, da' said the woman at reception. 'That's the Ukrainian way of saying 'yes'', she told me. And it was, especially in the West of Ukraine where Lvov is located. They even write it differently in Ukrainian - Lviv or Lbib (backward b's however.).

 

But much of Ukraine speaks Russian as did she, because Ukraine was colonized for Russsia by Catherine the Great with her lover Potemkin.

 

So, I've traveled over much of Ukraine, except, of course, Chernobyl, which I've avoided and some of the East and the Chernoye More (Black Sea) resorts, which I have on my list.

 

I've been to Odessa much and most times fly into Kiev which is more like a Western City or a large post-Communist Russian City, with better-fed people.

 

So, why this particular city, Dnepropetrovsk, with its hard to pronounce name?

 

The people there live on the street. It has a population of 1 to 2 million people. It's somewhat isolated from the rest of the world but on a major river -- the Dnieper (it's often called Dnipro or Nipro for short).

 

It has major universities, and many students and many residents have very high education. Many university graduates stay in the city, even if they remain unemployed or poorly employed.

 

It has some of the most beautiful women in the Western world.

 

It has some of the most beautiful women in the Western world, and they're proud of it.

 

They like to show that they're beautiful, and unlike the hypocrisy of beautiful western women who say 'oh, you think I'm beautiful (fishing for compliments, I think my nose is too crooked -- or something else is wrong). Or maybe western women are just too neurotic about their looks. (You're more than 10 years older than me and you're looking at me and admiring me -- oh, GROSS! Dnirpo women are very democratic about their looks -- anybody can admire them and they're happy; they know their beauty is transitory and by the age of 35, it's usually gone. Ask a Dnipro (or Ukrainian or Russian woman) 'are you beautiful?' and she will reply 'yes'. End of story. No discussion. It's just a fact, like being 5'7" tall and having a certain weight.

 

Truth is a Ukrainian woman who is pretty, and they are ordinarily very pretty, also has a figure to match -- bikini ready. No dieting for summer sun. Just put on a bikini any time of year and go to a beach. They're all slim; a fat young woman is unusual (except in Kiev where there's more money, more restaurants a more Western diet, and more dining out.)

 

Dnipro is the market town for a hundred miles around or more, the major city between Odesssa and Kiev, but on a dog-leg so it's not half-way between them but more to the East.

 

In short it's an isolated major city with no competition, and the people there are more or less wonderful. I wander this city with huge and expensive cameras and seldomn get hassled and usually feel plenty safe (don't you try it though; I'm 'street smart' too.)

 

The locals often now reconize me, and if trouble's brewing, somebody may bump me in the shoulder and whisper in my ear in English 'Go!', and give me a little shove, which means there's some drunk young man spouting off about the American guy with the cameras and what he's going to do (alcohol talking).

 

And I've never had one problem there, which I've had in Odessa with its gangs of homeless kids who'll ask for a 'bite to eat' and then when you pull out the money 'snatch and grab' it. Or who live by shoplifting the local grocery stores. Odessa'a also a seaport town which means there are those who would prey in seafarers who just got a pay packet, and the thieves would only be too happy to prey also on a guy with expensive cameras. I walk a little fast in Odessa and more carefully.

 

Dnipro is a poor city, but growing, if in fits and starts, and it has a long ways to go. But it has wonderful people and its city watches out for its own.

 

Yes, there are beggars sitting under signs of beautiful women, as I've photographed, and life IS hard. There are few older men as in all of Ukraine and Russia. A poor health care system is to blame, too much drinking, hard economic times and the transition from Communism to Capitalism that was rocky with the 'guaranteed job' disappearing together with the guaranteed refrigerator full of food also disappearing, leaving many eating potatoes all winter, hoping for a good yield of tomatoes from their truck gardens (If they have one, or from their dachas, if they, or a relative has one).

 

In the late summer, like bears, the people eat very healthy . . . storying up for a winter of eating root crops . . . and apples, (but not apples this year . . . the great winter of this last year froze the buds off the apple trees, and the same with aprocots (minus 37 Celsius --almost the same with Fahrenheit).

 

There are also great photos to be had in Dnirpo, which is really the main reason I keep going there. The people do live and socialize on the street.

 

Americans and Europeans do their socializing in homes, cars, work and cafes. Those are hard places to bring cameras for a foreigner. In Dnipro, one only has to walk the streets to get memorable photos.

 

That's why I go there.

 

Some resident even think I live there, though I only stay a little at a time here and there, but laden with cameras and often in the city center, I'm pretty conspicuous.

 

John (Crosley)

And a local newspaper photographer of some prominence shooting a demonstration for his paper yelled to me, 'better get your cameras under cover or they'll rust', and my response was 'I get some of my best photos in the rain -- when it rains, that's when I take my cameras out.'

 

It doesn't rain too terribly often in California much of the year, except winter, when it rains in great storms, but rain provides wondrous reflections such as seen on the sidewalk pavement here and alters all sorts of ordinary views -- and it also causes people to behave differently.

 

So, when the rain comes out, I don't stop photographing, and in fact, I'll head out in the rain and START photographing.

 

Equipment can be cleaned, lubed and adjusted, but it's a false economy, if you're looking for original images, to forego that special image to protect a camera to make it last 20 years instead of 10, I think.

 

And with care, today's modern cameras will last just as long, even if they've been rained on, if they get a trip to the manufacturer for a cleaning now and then; same with lenses, and with Vibration Reduction gyros inside, they'll need that CLA sooner than later anyway.

 

John (Crosley)

looking at your photos with the "gallery slideshow" tool. And have spotted this one. Marvellous combination and crop. This is a really striking picture.

 

Luca

Luca,

 

An Almost Cartier-Bresson moment; it lacks the studied use of the background to make a great composition; remember his famous portrait of the French artist/intellectual (I forget which one, he knew and photographed so many) walking across a street in the rain, topcoat over his head (and during the German occupation of Paris, too, when Cartier-Bresson at that time had escaped, I think from German hands.)

 

I think.

 

I could be proven wrong.

 

Cartier-Bresson did everything better so far as I can tell and 50 years ago or more.

 

I'd have been satisfied to have be an acolyte.

 

But he was a lone wolf.

 

I'm left to my own devices, and sometimes things he did and things I do seem to intersect -- and have since before I ever heard of him.

 

Thanks for stopping by; your test is the hardest of all the critics, I think.

 

John (Crosley)