The Bazaar: Shutting Up Shop The Hard Way

Less than two decades ago, individuals engaged in business in Ukraine

and the rest of the Soviet Union were criminals by law, now almost

everyone is in business. This woman operates her 'business' out of a

shipping container at a bazaar near a major metro station in Kyiv,

Ukraine's capital city. While the city center boasts major brands sold in

Paris, many citizens shop in such bazaars for 'knockoff' goods and very

inexpensive clothes, food and other goods. This woman strains here to

shut the door on her shop/shipping container at day's end. 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 substantial photographic knowledge to help improve my

photography. Thanks! Enjoy! John

John, okay! Big smile! Shutting Up Shop The Hard Way. It is that you set this title, because you can easily see it totally different.Seeing the thumbnail, I already had a big smile. Smashing the door, great!

Yep, this is life. Great shot!

with kind regards.

Either she's trying to close it or get in - the photo doesn't really tell us which so easily, so I captioned it to make it easier, though I didn't have to and could have left it as a mystery.

 

Sometimes life is best left with mysteries, but I felt this photo deserved an explanatory caption, and a good one.

 

After all, it's a 'story', and in a way the caption and the photo are a mini-documentary with the words and the photo being absolutely complete.

 

I feel nothing else need be said about this entire circumstance and probably will have nothing further to say about the economics of this situation or how it came about -- it's already been pretty well capsulized.

 

That may take away some of my fun, as I like slowly revealing things sometimes, but then again, sometimes it's good to give viewers a break.

 

I like this photo very much, though the subject is way off center, and as Dennis Aubrey would say, it's got the subject moving the 'wrong way' (again).

 

So what?

 

It's what I saw, and I liked it enough to take it several times as she worked the door shut.

 

This was the best of the bunch, catching her action 'just so'.

 

I waited, anticipated and was amply rewarded, I think, and given a bonus for shooting under very low light in this dim alleyway and for NOT boosting my ISO to freeze the action completely.

 

Joke, you have shown us the epitome of motion blur -- this is my little contribution to the genre of 'blur' in recent postings.

 

Sometimes things just seem to 'work out' for the poor street photographer, though very, very seldom.

 

(this photo had some near blowouts in the whites, which had to be selected darkened a little bit with shadow/highlight filter to make the scene better viewable, so if it's marked unmanipulated, that would be a mistake which I should fix)

 

Joke, it's always good to hear from you -- even if my ordinary photography doesn't hold a candle to yours -- the best of which I regard as 'world class'. (I've been surveying gallery offerings once again, from their web sites all over the world; your recent posting/ boy jumping from stairs literally is world class and has the chance to become a classic if you promote it enough and get it seen by the proper people. A nearly perfect -- or actually 'perfect' blur photo -- is a valuable and rare commodity in the photographic fine arts.)

 

In the 'street' genre, blurs are pretty commonplace when one shoots later in the day and doesn't boost the heck out of one's ISO.

 

One wonders what the advent of the Nikon D3 and its 25,000 ISO is going to do to such photographs because they eliminate the probability of the 'accidental blur', although this photo was taken with a D300 which is capable of very high iso shooting, and I purposely did NOT boost the ISO, as a photographer's choice, to keep the tones from washing out which they do so much in higher iso captures from early evening with Nikon matrix metered shots.

 

John (Crosley)

 

(musingly)

Did you notice that although I had a chance to make a great shot of the woman in her struggle and to isolate her, I passed it up to capture the dreariness of what she was doing within her surroundings.

 

Normally, during daytime, when weather is good enough and especially during fair weather (not too hot or rainy), this alleyway has a fair number of people in it, and it can be impossible to take a shot of it.

 

But as closing on this very hot day came about, there was no one around; she was left to close up all alone.

 

This is an evening ritual in various bazaars in cities across Ukraine, and for all I know in the Moscow (Russia) flea market (if it's still there, as I remember it) as well as in Dnipropetrovsk and the world's largest market -- outside Odessa, Ukraine's Black Sea Port. In other words, it's iconic of a post-Soviet Eastern European tradition -- the bazaar closing -- shutting the door of the 'intermodal container' which doubles as a bazaar shop.

 

I actually got another capture of two other women doing the exact same thing with another container/shop just a little later that day, but I liked this one better for the isolation of one woman doing this within the context of the desolate background, plus the blur of her heavyset body and its striped top showing the motion as she 'threw her weight' into the task at hand.

 

The other captures were pretty good too, as I recall, though I haven't yet processed them finally for posting anywhere so I haven't seen them recently.

 

Ukrainian women are very, very fashion conscious (until they have children), then something seems to addle their mind, and more mature women start to do idiotic fashion things like wearing horizontally striped tops when they're already heavyweights. . . . ;~))

 

Go figure.

 

In a nation of beautiful young women, one might easily ask, where are all the older beautiful women? Even the ones in their '30s and early '40s. They just disappear, for the most part. (The ones who marry and go to the US and abroad to Western Countries remain beautiful well into their dotage, at least in recent history, which makes a good argument for encouraging the beautiful young women to marry and move abroad.

 

Even one of the Moscow newspapers a few years ago ran a series of articles about 'Where Have all the world famous Stunning Young Girls Gone from the Moscow Metro when they get into their thirties and early '40s?" (paraphrased) -- a deadly serious series, because as the home(s) of some of the world's most beautiful young women, one would expect their slightly older women to be equally stunning, which has turned out to be contrafactual.

 

(I have a good idea about the reason(s), but I won't burden anyone with my speculation unless someone presses me.)

 

John (Crosley)

Maybe you should have titled it "Some people do anything for a good sale". Great shot John.

I think that misses the point about the photo, which is to focus on the hardship in closing the container/shop door -- it is too much of a stretch to any possible 'sale' which one cannot imagine without stretching it.

 

You make 100 good ideas, and this one just didn't make it, in my view, sorry.

 

But I look forward to more good ones (the turntable one for the other photo was a great insight, for instance, and changed my view of how i see my own photo.)

 

;~))

 

(I think we are well acquainted enough on this forum we can be completely honest, right?)

 

Best to you.

 

John (Crosley)

Life is too short to take things personal and hey, in life, sometimes you hit it and other times you miss. As long as the balance tilts towards the hit side I am happy. ;) I would not expect anything less than honesty from you John.

We have what is getting to be a longer history in our on-line relationship, and one of the things that goes with comradeship is the ability to be honest with friends, especially over an intellectual point so minor as that.

 

Your response is nothing less than I would have expected. (If I had any doubts, I would not have written what I did.)

 

John (Crosley)