Making a 'Beeline' Home

This homeward bound man at day's end walks with bowling ball in

satchel past a poster with the logo for the mobile phone

company 'Beeline' in a major city in 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 photographic knowledge to help improve my

photography. Thanks! Enjoy! John

is it a juxtaposition attempt or about the man? (a bit of both). due to a tendency excess of formalism a wait for better light would have been good, but if you were portraying the worker it doesn't make sense.

It is not necessarily supposed to 'make sense'.

 

This is a 'composition' which does happen to 'make sense' if one understands he

s a bowler, but from a formal, art, standpoint, it's a juxtaposition in which the lines of the poster, background, coupled with his exact position, foreground, convey a precise aesthetic moment -- too soon and it would be wrong -- too late and he'd be intersecting and covering the bowling pins represented.

 

You might try desaturating it (I thought about presenting it in black and white), to see what it looks like then, just as a near-abstraction -- some minor bit of niceness one sees on the street for just a fleeting moment before it all descends into chaos.

 

Look at his arm and how it is parallel to the lines of the bowling pins -- and the strength of his bowler's arms, and his aggressive stride, plus the satchel he has in his right hand.

 

I can't make you like this, or maybe even explain it to you -- you might either like it or not.

 

It is posted for its compositional merit and for no other reason, basically -- (except that it appealed to me).

 

I don't mind that you are puzzled, as many of my photos tell 'stories' but not all of them do.

 

Thanks for letting me know.

 

John (Crosley)

I forgot to add that the shadow across the billboard and building wall roughly parallels the bottom line extension of the lower left corner of the bowling pins and also of his left arm, for a nice touch of parallelism, especially since the 'shadow' is broken into two parallel lines, top and bottom.

 

Thus, this photo is a photo about parallel lines as well as anything else, and they are a part of the overall composition. In esssence, there are four parallel lines from upper left to lower right if one takes parallel lines and carries out their natual extensions.

 

How's that?

 

John (Crosley)

 

miss expressed myself, i meant that if you were after him my comment didn't make sense.

Naturally i enjoyed many of its formal values. He seems to be standing still in a awkward gesture, but that I like.

Ah, well, you can see that my opinions don't bend to popular or unpopular opinions - I just take 'em as I see 'em and to the extent that I can, I defend 'em, and if they are not so defendable, I give up.

 

Parts of this one are defendable - parts less so.

 

It looks pretty good on black and white and if I had an opening in black and white in my 'Black and White From Then to Now' folder, it might have been posted in B&W there instead of here in color. Either place it fits in pretty well.

 

Some Black and White photos are there because they have composition and no particular 'color' values, but also are interesting. Others are there despite being good color photographs but the colors in their stengths detract from the subjects, which sometimes are strong -- being 'street' photographs with more typical 'street' photographs and all.

 

Sometimes, like here, it's a tossup even right until the final second when I push the button on 'browse' and start 'browsing' though my various 'upload' files or 'web size' files and make a decision whether to go *color or B&W*.

 

Sometimes only the fates know for certain why I make a particular choice -- other times reason dictates only one answer, even if colors are strong enough for a photo to be in the color folder it'll end up in B&W because of subject matter and composition.

 

Thanks for coming back and explaining -- that's real attention to detail.

 

John (Crosley)

it is surreal to a certain extent.

the frame is perfect and so are the colours.

Do you feel flattered?

 

Luca

 

PS how much equipment do you lug around?

Exposed enlarged on a wall test -- did you enlarge it personally? Or project it?

 

It was meant to be surreal, kind of like the early 20th C. surreal painting masters, but I am not a master of course, just a photographer with a most eclectic background.

 

I passed this poster several days before I took this photo and wanted to take something nice but there were no pedestrians and shadows were wrong, and this particular day everything fell into place lickety split.

 

Maybe I should change my name to some well-known surrealist master or something and make a new entry into the world of photography?

 

I'm always fascinated by geometry within the 'real' world.

 

Aren't you?

 

It greatly helps the 'street' photograper.

 

Me at least.

 

Thanks for noticing.

 

John (Crosley)

 

Oh, and almost always two cameras, presently two Nikon D2X -- one an 'S' model and one not. But sometimes two D200s or a mix of the two models, but always with a superwide zoom on one, and a moderate or superzoom to long tele on one or a moderate to long tele on that one, often with a large aperture (a lot of heavy equipment which breaks my f***ing back and neck but I get so much pleasure out of a proper photograph, that it's like my drug . . . my opium . . . a well-taken photograph -- yes, really)

 

JC