faces in time The Sideways Glance

The photographer gets a not unfriendly 'sideways glance' from this

garbage worker at a local bazaar after a weekend of activity, as she

breaks during cleanup. 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

..being relatively small I hesitated to look in detail your post .. for I know you to be

one of the old masters in the field. I personally think the majority of us are not qualified to

rate . For what special learned experience do we have . The name alone is

completely proficient ( to be honest )..hehe!

..But I would like to give it a try and I kindly request you the same to correct me on whatever

personal perception that I have. If you remember , you got me the longest unpleasant commentary in your

portfolio and instilled to me the very important basics( the good part). I did try to be a good student but at time my post had no narration for the lack of thoughts.

.. I have rated this photo the highest for originality.. being the only of it's kind ,really a rare catch, the

only person in that matter ( I don't want to be very specific.. otherwise I would consider this photo a trap) And, the same for aesthetic .The unseen beauty..of how you anticipated this person movement to come

up with this finish was my cosideration. On the technical side .. perhaps I have no way of identifying any flaws if there is/are. The excellent rating is not a defensive move .. but from my own sincere assessment..

 

 

Hmmmmmmmm, I am not that good in words at the moment, so just a rating, it explains also a lot

 

---kind regards Els

A thoughtful and generous rating from you is always taken seriously and speaks volumes because it is backed by a great amount of serious work from a serious photographer of talent.

 

Thanks.

 

John (Crosley)

I have gone so far as to remonstrate a member or two who has given a photo the highest rating, but I won't do so here.

 

This is a photo that, for some, could earn that rating, especially in portraiture for its originality (street portraiture), as you aptly have explained.

 

I was surprised when first posted it got middle 4s in ratings, but now see it has started to climb the ladder as people with more interest in seeing such works begin to rate it.

 

Rating is a largely personal endeeavour, and you are free to rate my work high or low, as you see fit; I won't box your ears either way, unless you do so for demonstrably wrong reasons.

 

Your reasons here are excellent, but for the same, you don't have to justify them to me, but I see you know that and you are just giving me an explanation that you are not trying to 'buy peace' for an old discussion we had, and that's quite fine.

 

I am pleased that the photo pleased you . . . and yes, I am older, but regrettably, I am not yet a master -- Henri Cartier-Bresson was the 'master' and he ever will be. Maybe Elliott Erwitt and a few others, but not me, regrettably though I endeavour to be so. (Remember, I didn't take photos mainly for 35 years and only recently took up my cameras -- or I might have a major body of work under my belt.)

 

Maybe some day, if I live long enough and take enough photos,and hasten in my hopes to get published, I'll actually be remembered on some dusty old library shelf devoted to photography -- the 'minor' artists . . . decidedly . . . (street) of course.

 

Thanks for the kind explanation.

 

Ratings deserve no thanks. They are what they are whether high or low, as you know, but your courtesy is greatly appreciated.

 

Best wishes.

 

John (Crosley)

I had to read it three times to understand it. BIG smile! Almost as big as him/her's in the picture.

 

Oh great! I can't figure out the GENDER of the silly person in this picture. The way you took this picture made the nose bigger (which is why I gave it a 7 on the origionality BTW).

 

I love the way "PAT" (which is the name of the character) looks at you. Mr. PAT is in the back looking for garbage and that is so cool!

 

I almost feel like the BIG BAD WOLF is asking you. So, Mr. "what's your name again", as PAT is rubbing up against you, do you want to take a look at the garbage with us? HA!!

 

So you must have had a great conversation with them!

 

I also love that you kept this picture in color because all the blue is wonderful. He is wearing blue in the background and there is blue on the trashcans and blue on Pat's shirt in front. Then the rust colors are gorgeous.

 

You did a FINE FINE job on this one.. YEP.. YEP..

 

Oh I tease you! Sorry! ;)

 

he he

 

~ micki

This was marked as a color photo from the beginning . . . with the predominance of 'blue' throughout the photo as you noticed.

 

Some photos are greatly aided by posting in color and are best presented as 'color' photos; in others, color detracts, and those are the ones I feel best about desaturating.

 

Sometimes a marvelous photo in color just has to be desaturated to fit a particular folder, such as 'B&W From Then to Now' in which a general style and/or attitude prevails -- e.g., there now 'street photography' in the more classical sense prevails, as I've stopped posting 'street portraits' such as this in that folder.

 

In the single photo, color folder I recently did post a landscape and also a study in signs, showing three different signs of diminishing size, each showing one or more figures, all taken at night. I think for an hour or so, this showed up in my single photo, color, folder, because of its strength, but I want to keep that folder now more dominated by distance shots -- including 'street' at a slight distance, not close up.

 

I remember the Saturday Night Live 'skit' in which one of their comediennes, played the androgynous 'Pat' - a skit so funny I laughed so hard I got asthma, a particular affliction of mine. I once almost singlehandedly shut down a Victor Borge comic presentation in a concert hall because I was laughing hysterically (and coughing phlegmatically and uncontrollably) with each 'joke' by the old Danish Ham, (on wry). [joke's often quoted -- not mine]

 

That 'Pat' was so androgynous and had an ambiguous name (PAT) and it was indistinguishable which sex that person was, no matter how hard the questioner tried to ferret out the information -- only to be met with a new and equally androgynous and ambiguous answer, continuing to leave the players' identity in doubt. (I think it was Julia Sweeney, though wrong could I be, said I, Yoda fashion.)

 

So, look at the hair, and look at the face.

 

The hair is 'red' in a nation where redheads do not generally occur naturally, but this person - this 'Pat' person, does have the facial colorings of a redhead, so it might be real red hair. But the age indicated by the face would indicate some browning of that red hair, as red hair often browns out or blonde-browns with age. But countervailing that is that people in Ukraine often look 20 years older than their true ages as an American would expect to judge them.

 

For instance, I met two people, yesterday and today. One, a woman, said I looked no more than (somewhere in my fourth decade, rather early).

 

I just met a woman on a major street -- the second time I've met her -- consider the odds -- and she still thinks I'm about that same age, though I once set her straight. People will not believe me about my age or they slap me on the back and say 'molodets' (Malyadyets) which means generally what a mother says to a little boy who hits the pot first time peeing standing up (Good Boy!!!)

 

So, you can't necessarily go by indicated age and 'browning of naturally red hair as an age indicator, and red hair is a clue. Red hair most often comes from a bottle (henna or similar), just ask Ronald Reagan . . . 's ghost.

 

So, I go for the suggestion that this redness came from a bottle, plus it has a stylish 'wave' in the right side here, which indicates that it was brushed back -- female style.

 

Men in Ukraine typically wear very short crew cuts -- buzz cuts, often and it look good on their regular features, (and even makes mine look better, though definitely not Ukrainian -- grandfather was born in Russia, but he was German fleeing as a kid somebody killing somebody else in the late 19th C.)

 

So, the result is -- based on photo analysis (which you excel at -- that this is a woman.

 

Plus she had breasts which to me was a dead giveaway and worked with a crew of only women, which to me also was a dead giveaway.

 

So, I knew going in it was a woman, but who's to say she's not a bit butch?

 

Short hair, with a wave, is contrary to what one finds among younger women in Ukraine, but older women, especially those who have gone to pot (and there are far too many of those as there are not enough men to go around and the men don't all make particularly good father's/husbands due to drink, accidents, early death, multiple girlfriends, etc.) wear their hair shorter and often with headscarves (which I once thought were called babushkas, but that means 'old woman' or 'grandmother' which is predominantly who wears those old scarves - which are found in country and poor settings quite frequently.

 

John F. Kennedy never had any influence among Ukrainian women, I think, as they have not gotten rid of their headgear; and Jackie O's pillbox never got exported to Ukraine, I suppose. (former Soviet Union).

 

Well, breasts and that she also was wearing a dress and working with a crew of women, did not make her 'Pat' for me, but I do understand your question about androgyny and your confusion.

 

I hope this has put that to rest.

 

Will you now call her 'butch' or just grandma (babushka)?

 

She may be in her '40s.

 

John (Crosley)

 

 

P.S. In the world of wide angle lenses, this 12 mm lens (a DX, or digital frame lens, which requires a 1.5 'crop factor') is equivalent to an 18 mm film lens.

 

It features very close focusing and almost infinite depth of field when shot stopped down a little (not here), so things close and far are in focus -- a major boon, which is why many 'point and shoot' older cameras were wide angle lenses with small apertures, plus those lenses were easy to produce out of plastic.

 

Now, with such a lens held inches from a subject's face (she probably could smell my breath, if you want to imagine that . . .)

 

I often 'suck in' when photographing close in just for that reason when a stranger); the lens shows nearer things bigger, just as all lenses do.

 

But in the world of close focus and nearness, a nose that's six inches away and a face that's nine inches away or eight inches away, show substantial size disparity -- with the nose looking like Mt. Everest and the face looking like it's somewhere in the distance. That's the nature of wide angle lenses, so if you want to make a feature bigger, get in close with a wide or ultra wide angle lens and then focus on it, and also on the other, (percentage wise) more distant feature and voila! Instant distortion, which is why this photo 'works' for you.

 

You can also see what a 'fish eye' does; if you look I think in this folder for a photo of a 'photographer' 'peeking' into a lens from the 'wrong side' or some such, you'll see one such photo.

 

'He' was a pro for whom I was demonstrating a fisheye at Bryce Canyon, his wife a few feet away. She looks like a distant mountain range, and his nose looks like Everest.

 

That's one reason fashion photographers and even 'girlie' photographers who try to eliminate 'distortion' tend to gravitate to the 'longer' lenses, even as long as 200 mm in focal length, to avoid this distorting effect, which means that they must have 'loooong' or 'biiiig' studios or shoot where there's plenty of room to back up (best not to shoot fashion or girls away from the rim of Bryce Canyon for if you step backwards to include more in your 'viewfinder', it can be a heck of a tumble)

 

JC

I used to use Henna on my hair back 20 years ago when we could do that to our hair. I loved what it did to my hair but they no longer let us use them in the states.

 

The fisheye look is my one of my favorite thing you do with the camera in these character shots. They are just full of life and character and draw people to them.

 

As for laughing, I can see you now caughing up a lung. I know what spasms can be started by a simple laugh as I just got over that pnemonia. :) ~ All Smiles! ~ micki

Don't think that the placement of the person ('Pat?') in the background was a mere accident of happy timing. I waited to press the shutter until she (there, I give it away) was in that precise place to press the shutter release.

 

That ability comes from a study of my own photos which I made during creation of my Presentation: 'Photographers: Watch Your Background' which I think is PN's largest Presentation and possibly the basis for a book. (it's a work in progress too, hampered by outmoded software).

 

It's basically a guide on how to add an extra dimension to what might otherwise be ordinary photos and help guide them to extra complexity. Since we know that the better photos generally are the ones that the eye does not 'dismiss' and tends to 'wander around' engaging the mind and/or its artistic sensibilities and maybe even its intellectual properties, then a little extra 'something' in the background often does not hurt so long as it is analogous with what's in the photo and complements it.

 

The Russian/Ukrainian language has a wonderful word that should be a cognate (innately familiar to English speakers): analogichny -- analogous, except that no American knows how to use the word 'analogous' but almost every Russian/Ukrainian speaker does. It's common usage among most who view my photos or hear me describe them or other things, as I tend to dwell a lot on 'analogies' and/or analogous circumstances to make points.

 

That's why we can say that 'those who ignore history do so at their peril' because 'history tends to repeat itself' given the slow pace of change of human nature.

 

Just in our parents' and our own lifetimes we've seen Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, and some other, more minor dictators who have purged entire populations, not to mention the Turks vs the Armenians, which they say was just a byproduct of war and not an extermination . . . .

 

All those things in a lifetime; some of the greatest massacres just in the memory of some of those still living. And forget World War I and II (the Great Patriotic War) because those were fought by TWO sides.

 

So, I'm happy to be in a land sometimes where the word analogichny or analogichnaya is used with some frequency among those who speak with me.

 

Americans should consider its use more often and teaching the meaning of the word 'analogous' in school as a precursor to even understanding what school's all about.

 

Don't you think?

 

John (Crosley)

This had to have been captured with your D2X.

Larry Reibstein, lreibstein@sbcglobal.net

I can't tell so much difference between the D200 and the D2X or D2Xs in image quality as I can the build quality with the latter far outstripping the former for obvious reasons (price being the main one, based on quality of construction, but also the D2Xs has a CMOS sensor).

 

Frankly, however, I can't tell the difference, really. The ISO seems to make more difference.

 

John (Crosley)

I would like to feature this piece on redhedd.com if it's all right with you. Proper credit will be given. Please e-mail me to let me know at hillarylaclair@hotmail.com

I have written you; please watch your in-box in your e-mail.

 

John (Crosley)