Peeking Inside the Camera From the Wrong Side; a Photographer Turns Subject

This British professional landscape photographer, bundled against

the high mountain cold, his wife waiting in the background, appears

to have a peek inside the Nikon 10.5 mm 'fisheye' lens on a Nikon

digital camera and in return exchanges a very different 'look' for

his (and her) portrait near the rim of Utah's Bryce Canyon Nat'l

Park. 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

Great use of the fisheye; he's a good subject. Not sure if the woman in the bg works, she seems less than organically related to the composition. Could just be me.

I think the guy is a good subject too. We were talking photography after photographing sunrise over the 'hoodoos' at Bryce Canyon, it was still cold, he was a pro, and I had a newer fisheye (tack sharp as you can see, as it's a prime lens), and the subject came up of how best to use such an unusual lens.

 

I told him that one way was to take amazingly distorted 'portraits' and enlisted briefly his help.

 

His wife in the background (very near actually -- just a few feet away) was enlisted to stand there, because we needed to 'fill the frame'. I have written about the need for photographers to 'watch your background' and that's exactly what I did. Notice this is NOT posted as a 'street photograph' as the vast majority of my other photographs are, as the framing was manipulated though my involvement in subject placement.

 

Whether it 'works' or 'doesn't work', I think that it was necessary somehow to 'fill the frame' and his wife was the only thing that 'filled the fill' there in that early morning crisp air.

 

Maybe it's still crisp or more so there; I'm far away and the snow is falling and has been falling five days straight where I am.

 

I seldom use this 'fisheye' lens and often 'overlook' it, as it is a specialty lens, but in the right circumstances, especially for architectural work, it can be a life saver.

 

(Notice elsewhere my posted photo of the photographer standing at the edge of Bryce Canyon unprotected from a fall, and my 'fisheye' caught the canyon edge and the sky above, all in color.)

 

It's a useful piece of hardware -- one you usually can do without, but the price tag is quite low for a Nikon lens. For everyday use, I'd far prefer the 12~24 Nikkor which I now seldom go out without.

 

Best to you.

 

John (Crosley)

 

 

All the better to sniff you with... Oh... I was SO excited to see this picture! This one eyed man looking straight at the camera into a world! MY WORLD for only one moment. I can just get into his world and see inside of him through that eye!

I looked REALLY close into his eye (ctrl scroll). 360x close to be exact. I saw beautiful blue grey eyes just like my dads eyes with a bit of brown in them, a marking not unlike a marking that is a detail or mark that only each one of us has individually like a fingerprint. My dad has a brown mark like this as does my son. I have a bit of it myself! It makes me feel like I know this man, a bit of kidness and I feel warm!

The eyebrows make me feel laughter at the unkept way it just looks like they are wires of white string left above his eye. The long nose just sticking out there where you can touch it and the mouth you can not see. the grey cap is perfect and the blue coat gives it just enough color to match her blue coat (funny they match). She looks like she is a cardboard piece that you put out there to fill the space. She doesn't look real. Weird I know.

But it is strange... it is the way I see it. I love the movement of this picture! I love the feel!

I love the way I feel looking at it! I feel at home! I'm all smiles! ~ micki

How could I know that posting a photo such as this would touch your heartstrings as this one did?

 

I'm glad it did, and I have learned something new about the power of what to me is a rare but not necessarily 'great' photo to have special power over a special someone.

 

You have written about your experience with uncommon ability; you obviously are a writer.

 

I hope you'll continue to follow my work.

 

John (Crosley)

You are home.

 

Come home often.

 

John (Crosley)

I am a blogger... I am a typer! I type fast (I was a profession office manager so I made men like you look good by doing what they asked of me and enjoyed it tremendously). I can not spell nor do I have the gift of writing structure but I do know how to speak correctly and my husband speaks many languages and is a great writer. I also am expressive and hopefully even if my sentence structure and my spelling might not be the best I can explain myself pretty well in this forum. Luckily with the many different languages spoken here my spelling mistakes are not noticed unless of course my husband reads what I write. I do enjoy what you take pictures of. It is like not only looking at a great picture but sometimes like reading a great novel! ~ micki

All I need is the training to place it in the proper structure -- part by part.

 

I could easily make a living on that if I knew how to create the structure, and the dialogue. I have no training in writing dialogue; my forte is in writing nonfiction. Period.

 

I have never written fiction, despite the many naysayers who read news stories I wrote (the fictions I wrote were always attributed to the businessmen, politicos and diplomats who spoke the words -- I just quoted their --often-- nonsense and went looking for an 'explainer' -- someone who could pick apart the nonsense and blow holes in it that I knew were there, but as a 'neutral' party, but with a responsibility to make an 'accurate' presentation' I felt duty bound to find such persons. No one got a free ride when I was writing, that I knew about.

 

So, if someone presented a falsehood as fact, I felt duty bound not in my own name, since I was no 'expert' and my organization prided itself on its neutrality, to find an 'expert' who would provide the 'opposing viewpoint' rather than let falsehoods go undetected. I was pretty good at that.

 

Politicians and even whoremasters didn't always like me. I was offered a 'free pass' to the famed Mustang Ranch brothel by whoremaster (or chief pimp, however you like to state it), Joe Conforte himself, who allegedly is now in Brazil, free of the touch of the extradition laws and the IRS criminal complaints of tax evasion and possibly other charges.

 

I declined, not out of a lack of young man's lust or too much pride, but I had heard rumors (now confirmed by a former inmate of his 'asylum') that he planted film cameras in his walls and ran film of his customers cavorting when he had someone he wanted to blackmail.

 

I could imagine that if I refused to run stories he wanted or failed to kill stories that were derogatory of him, he would then send some film to Wes Gallagher, head of the Associated Press, pointing out that it was I who was frolicking with his 'girls of the evening'.

 

I wisely steered clear of that (honey) trap.

 

So Conforte, I hear tell, is evading extradition and warming his heels in Brazil, and I'm now taking photos instead of writing (after a career practicing law that ended a very long time ago). And this is just a very serious 'hobby' --but about as serious as serious gets.

 

I'd write a dozen screenplays, but I've never seen a screenplay, and don't know what producers and directors look for in quality screenplays as far as the technical points and am reluctant to even try to find a co-writer, since I am pretty much a loner about such things as writing and once pointed in the right direction I write like the wind (I challenge you to a typing match, spelling counts or not counts, either way).

 

(By the way, just install Google toobar; it has a wonderful spell checker for dialog boxes such as this is being created in. You'll never want for a spell check again!!)

 

I could write a book about certain topics in maybe two weeks if they are familiar to me and didn't require lots of research -- say travel issues and other 'light' fare.

 

But I'm no Jean Le Carre, the pseudonymous writer of those great spy and treachery novels, much as I enjoy his splendid writing, starting with 'The Spy Who Came in From the Cold'. David Cornwall is his real name, I think, and he had as interesting an early life as one could possibly imagine, which I invite you to research -- ideal training for a writer of spy novels and utterly fascinating to me.

 

If my careers had taken another turn, I might have ended up a serious writer -- even a screen writer and novelist, but again the dialogue question arises.

 

It's a tough one for me; I'm as deficient in 'making up dialogue' as I am in trying to invent a pretty picture in my mind. I can spot phony dialogue in an instance, but could I make it up -- I have sincere doubts. I can't paint, but I can recognize a pretty or aesthetic scene in an instant. It's just a variant of the same problem, I think.

 

But writing about it here gives me some ideas, and since I may be peddling my photos to New York book publishers, why not also ask the inevitable questions about other things, if the occasion arises while in The Big Apple?

 

So, you may have triggered an avalanche . . . or just a tiny temblor . . . in an already overburdened mind full of ideas and not enough hours in the day or enough helpers. I have one helper now and she's wonderful -- an absolute dream, just starting out and destined to 'own the world' one day, and she will, I hope, with my blessings.)

 

And I'll say, 'I knew her when'.

 

I'll post some photos of her from time to time (one is already posted, but not so noted).

 

Others, taken tonight, are more noteworthy, as she is a chameleon with a huge range of facial expressions and 'looks'.

 

My ideal life: Travel the world, keep my wonderful assistant as she climbs toward greatness, photograph 'street' and 'models' during the day, and maybe write during the evening.

 

Avoid senility or just stare it down and dare it to come and take me; I just dare it!!!

 

Somehow, it doesn't run in my family and the older men in my family (they all lived very long lives without benefit of modern medicine) proved very hale and hearty, and many quite vigorous and even more charismatic as they grew older, including my father, whom I never really understood until I reached a 'certain age' -- since we were not too close. He was quite a charismtic individual, but I just never knew it; dumb me.

 

And with his vigor, I know he'd be happy with the life I'm leading; maybe so proud his overall britches would burst at the seams.

 

We Crosleys never played golf.

 

But somehow we get along and keep busy.

 

Just look at the variety of my postings and the places they're posted from, all on a strict budget.

 

It's 7:25 a.m., I haven't been to bed yet, it's minus 8 C outside with snow and ice, the people speak Russian, I'm living for peanuts in an elegant apartment right out of an old novel, but leaving today for another apartment in a lesser city (still 1-2 million people) in a city far, far away -- a 7-1/2 hour bus ride -- all where English is only spoken with a thick accent and often quite wrongly, even by the perovotchiks (interpreters), who often are quite sure they're 'correct' in their English knowledge because they learned it in school from someone who'd actually once been to England, for instance.

 

I'll be back soon, and then off again, here and there, maybe a perpetual itinerant, always keeping close to my assistant who lives 8,000 miles away and who is beginning to travel with me (a close friend, not a lover -- she has a boyfriend she talks about all the time with great love, who calls her constantly and obviously greatly misses her when she travels). He knows a good deal when he's got one. He's also obviously a great guy with excellent taste.

 

If you happen to have a spare screenplay from some worthy work, or know of a published screenplay, all marked up, that I can buy, say for a film school course, I'd be very interested in acquiring one or several different ones to study their structure.

 

Then, who knows?

 

All these little anecdotes actually have great big stories with much color, behind them.

 

If I don't write them, nobody will.

 

My mind is even more colorful and evocative than my photographs, too, I think, if you can imagine that!

 

I look forward to hearing from you when you next decide to say 'hello' here, fergiswife.

 

John (Crosley)

John: Great picture, for some reason when I saw it I thought of being forced to read Charles Dickens in school, (who I detested at the time, now think of quite differently).

You... you write and write. You must yearn for the english word if you are somewhere where it is not spoken or spoken in such a way where people use it as their first language. I am home alone and do not have a hook up for cable TV nor do I have a way for any other TV hook up. Only a DVD player (through my son's Playstation). I listen to Talk Radio if I get board of any music or the "Director's comments" on a movie and watch the whole movie over and over again while hearing what they say about the movie. I find that enjoyable while I go on with the day. I sit alone until the kids come home from school. I don't read as much as I used to because my eyes (even tho I don't wear glasses) don't see as well and I get tired to quickly. See.. I have seizures (YUCH) So... I look at everything so much more VIVID now. I think it might be because I have been so much closer to a different world and seen things in such a different life, a different smell and different taste! For the last six months my life has changed. We moved from Japan (where we lived for three years) and now live in Florida (where yes they speak English) and I just do nothing but enjoy my day and relax and do things for myself. FINALLY for myself and not others. No pressure, no hassles and enjoy things... like this picture. I am finally able to enjoy something as simple as this picture. That is why some of my pictures show such PAIN and some show such JOY! For the first time in my life I am HAPPY and feel good about myself but part of me is also scared. I have never liked having my picture taken but now, I really don't care! I don't care because I am me, take it or leave it. I have finally gone back to doing the thing I LOVE and that is ART... doing this wonderful thing and it has just made me grow and I feel so GOOD! Seeing others works and sharing how I feel about it even makes me feel better! I think you SHOULD write! I think it is GREAT that you are out there and traveling and not staying in a crappy job doing crappy work (trust me I worked for lawyers in Monterey back in the early 90's and they were arghhhh awful).

I should read more... if not read I should listen to book tapes! Silly I have read all the liquid books, John Grisham and such but I should go back to reading the real stuff! I just didn't have time when I was volunteering all my talents for GOOD! Maybe I should write, maybe I should think of some avenue to really use my art. I should do more publishing as I was once really good at it! Networking is what I am actually really good at. Of course "I" have used the word I way to much, hmmm maybe this would be the time to go back an edit and change those sentences... but that would take time and the kids want to play soccer... hmmmm. One would ask when "SHE" meaning me says the word I if they havn't started being a bit controlling... hmmm. My husband would say yes. I say Darn RIGHT!! I'm sure your having a great time meeting people that are just a blast to meet. My dog and I have a greaet time sitting at home and playing with the computer, a ball and the camera! Enjoy ~ micki

And a little contradictory -- fun and scared, happy and controlling and all those other seeming contradictions, but I am so many contradictions all rolled into one myself that I probably entirely would understand you if I met you.

 

That's partly why I can take the photos I take. My assistant spoke today of her boyfriend as a 'real man' which I took to mean that maybe I was not a 'real man', which I rubbed into her quite a bit, as we had a long journey and preparing for it was under horrible time pressure and she was 'feeling the heat' not having done such things before and maybe a little snipish, but I am used to such things.

 

Well, I told her, I don't have to worry about whether I am a 'man' or not; the Russians have a funny way of evaluating their 'men' and their 'masculinity' and their men die on average at about age 57, of broken health and broken dreams, nursed by doctors and nurses whose primary job is to help them toward their decline rather than cure them -- three week to three month stays in hospitals are common for simple ailments in part because no one is available to take care of people when they're home, as everybody is working or there is not enough good food or even good bed space at home -- hospitals, even with roaches, are a bit of a 'spa' in that people wait on you and even though health care no longer is 'free' in Russia, it is affordable, but not 'cost-effective' if you consider the consequences (if you get my drift) (and no, I'm not in Russia . . . she is . . . my estranged wife is Russia, her entire family is (I have good relations with them and may visit them soon) and I have a Russian visa coming -- and truth be told, I'm just not that far away, with the snow falling every day, the temperature minus 8 Celsius, the streets in my new town so slippery that I'm laying in wait now to take a photo of somebody falling to their as* at night when the ice is really thick (almost got one at 1:00 a.m. this morning, Sunday on the way to the supermarket to get food, with my feet constantly slipping and sliding. If I ever get it, it may be titled 'A Fall the Insurance Adjusters Just Cannot Contest'.

 

Falling on your keister here is just part of ordinary life, as is riding in a communal van for the equivalent of 7 cents, anywhere in town, as most people don't have cars, but he vans are efficient, cruise the streets next to the curbs, drive fairly slowly, stop at the slightest indication someone wants a ride, the drivers are generally quite courteous (the vans are privately owned), they follow a fixed route), most are Mercedes (which makes vans that run and run and run and run, even in a low gear at slow speeds, up and down hills day in and day out, although Japanese and other vehicles are making inroads).

 

And as the days pass, I meet photomodels who've answered my ads countrywide; a few that should have their heads examined for wondering if they could be photographed, but some simply stunners who've never been photographed before and never would be exposed to the world except for me (don't look for them on Photo.net either, as I haven't decided what to do with this new found wealth).

 

I travel with portable studio lights in a suitcase, and here the women delight in their beautiful looks, and will pose for very little -- for many I 'overpay' by local standards, so they can make their university tuition or pay for books -- for some it means the difference between attending or not attending school to have a photo session with me.

 

We have evaluated after two trips here (I do NOT say where purposely), and I can absolutely say that NOT ONE woman I've photographed that I or my assistant am in contact with or able to reach now has any hesitation to be photographed by me a second time, and that means even those photographed deshabille at least in part for the most part, but not entirely, for the most part, as nudes are not my forte, though I would like to make it a strength.

 

I have a rule: Don't f**ck the models and don't make passes at them. Treat them with respect. Many are hungry for good food; if you're eating or it's mealtime, ask them to sit down and eat with you before or after a photo shoot and serve them good food. It pays back in spades. None of this 'ugly photographer' business -- 'honey, you're so ugly you should get out of the business' way of talking that some photographers who work with pro models are sometimes famous for.

 

I work usually now with amateurs (after starting with young professionals for my personal training with studio lights/gear a year or so ago, and tried to rent studios, but found I was 'marked' as a 'mark' -- a 'rich American' and it was just easier to buy a suitcase full of studio strobes, umbrellas, light stands, etc., and pay the money all at once rather than get 'nickel and dimed to death by greedy photographers who didn't contribute much and tried to squeeze the most paid hours our of their studios while contributing almost nothing (the exception is Pro Photo studio in Odessa, where they are wonderful and have a man, Igor, who works with them, who is amazingly talented as a wedding/studio photographer).

 

When I awoke, the flat was like Park Avenue, adjusted for being behind the former Iron Curtain -- probably the flat of some long-ago high party official just rented out nightly for the first time and remodeled Western style, and now in another, much poorer and very remote but quite populous city (not town or village, but major city, in a flat I often rent, one of the most luxurious in town, but still not much, even though it's Western style -- well -- it's like a one-bedroom American apartment, but the hallways and entryways leave much to be desired and the light bulbs in the hallway frequently are out, as is the rule in these parts and for four or five thousand miles east of here and a thousand miles north and 400 or so miles south.

 

But there's no graffiti, which is uncommon, so this is a 'high class' affair.

 

Decrepit and 'high class' take on a new meanings when you find that the richest people in town live in places that are 'nice inside' but the outsides are worse than slumlike -- the curse of the former Communist world, where the people who were supposed to 'take care' or the buildings and grounds were not the residents but some 'People's worker' who didn't show up for work or who was drunk, and then the fall of Communism and no one stepped forward to take down the graffiti that accumulated, and in most buildings (except the richest) to install security systems, except easily defeated two-button combination doors, which one could just punch away at for ten minutes by trial and error until they open --- let's see 1, 1; 1, 2; 1,3, 1,4 and so on until it's 9, 9 and eventually 0,0 and 'click' the door lock snaps and there's slightly delayed entree into the supposed 'security' building.

 

It just keeps out the confused drunks, that's all, and they all have a place to crawl into anyway when it's minus 8 Celsius, or they'd all be dead.

 

So, you're happy in Florida with your kids and the warmth and the canine, not hearing Japanese spoken every day, but with a case of the jitters (in more ways than one) and here I am, perambulating around with my cameras, also enjoying the images I produce and still producing street images at a prodigious pace.

 

And planning what I'm going to do with them beyond Photo.net; as this is a proving ground for me - a sort of training ground and test audience.

 

I'm always open to suggestions, whether here in these comments or by e-mail or otherwise.

 

Good to hear from you.

 

You're always welcome here.

 

John (Crosley)