Brilliant street photo from Manchester on new year's eve

As street photography, great image.
Sadly, England and Australia show this behaviour when the amber juice is guzzled.
Commonplace and Uncouth.
 
ian_watts said:
I loathe the yobbishness of much of our culture (and this weekend drunkenness is very much part of it) but it's hardly a new phenomenon – more a continuation of the very long tradition of alcohol fuelled debauchery perfectly satirised by Hogarth 250 years ago.
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It certainly was around a long time ago. Society changes though and we improve public health and society for the better. In my own lifetime I've seen it happen with things like smoking and drink-driving. I met a patient a while back who was terminally ill - he'd work with asbestos a lot earlier in life. That's something I probably wont see at the end of my medical career. We didn't used to have strict health and safety legislation in this country - we do now and I've met many surgeons who undertake training/experience in places like India because you just don't see certain types of injuries in the UK anymore. We used to have abhorrent levels of poverty in the UK and people suffered without access to healthcare. A generation of people decided it wasn't acceptable and the national health service was formed. These are all truly great things. Hopefully one day we'll look back on photographs like the one above and see them in the same way we see Don McCullin's photographs of tenement slums.
 
This is NOT a good street photography picture!

OK, I'm not an expert, but I don't like it, too much going on, no real focus point.

Now if you crop it and make 2 or 3 pictures out of it.... that's a different deal.

1) The cool horizontal brit with the vertical beer - gorgeous
2) The guy held by policemen front right and the 'pleading' woman - very strong picture!
3) The people in back... well, average but worth a snap.
Or 1) and 3) combined, guy in the street with his onlookers behind - really not bad.

Just crop!

All together they just make a great big mess.

Just my opinion

Edit......

I tried the cropping and both pictures look fine, but I can't probably share them because of copyright issues..... too bad, but try it!
 
"Here's a take on why it ended up viral. It's an OK image. In terms of what's going on, it does indeed have a lot. It unfortunately has enough other stuff, cars, extraneous colors etc that don't make it live up to its hype."

We live in an age so saturated with neon signs and junk cluttering up our frames that I hardly think this is an appropriate criticism. You have to go well out of your way, to relatively depressed areas with less economic and tourist activity to get away from that. This picture is about New Years Eve in a pretty busy city. The cars and advertisements are part of that. A photograph isn't supposed to represent some unattainable version of reality-- i.e. a street photo without extraneous colors, cars, clutter... I think this is a hilarious and pretty brilliant documentary street photo, and we should call it what it is. I would love to have taken this photo and I'm pretty sure just about everyone on this forum is with me.

Kudos to the photographer
 
MiniMoke said:
This is NOT a good street photography picture!

OK, I'm not an expert, but I don't like it, too much going on, no real focus point.

Now if you crop it and make 2 or 3 pictures out of it.... that's a different deal.

1) The cool horizontal brit with the vertical beer - gorgeous
2) The guy held by policemen front right and the 'pleading' woman - very strong picture!
3) The people in back... well, average but worth a snap.
Or 1) and 3) combined, guy in the street with his onlookers behind - really not bad.

Just crop!



I tried the cropping and both pictures look fine, but I can't probably share them because of copyright issues..... too bad, but try it!
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You must not like wide lenses... As someone whose normal lens is a 28 I can tell you I aspire to make photographs like this--with exactly this much going on. This is the point of lenses with a wide angle of view--they can capture more! Why anyone would ruin that by cropping is beyond me.
 
jojoman2 said:
You must not like wide lenses... As someone whose normal lens is a 28 I can tell you I aspire to make photographs like this--with exactly this much going on. This is the point of lenses with a wide angle of view--they can capture more! Why anyone would ruin that by cropping is beyond me.
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I agree totally here ... the whole point of the wide perspective is what we see in the image. It's telling several stories.
 
jojoman2 said:
You must not like wide lenses... As someone whose normal lens is a 28 I can tell you I aspire to make photographs like this--with exactly this much going on. This is the point of lenses with a wide angle of view--they can capture more! Why anyone would ruin that by cropping is beyond me.
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I understand your point, this scene is a comprehensive representation of new years eve events,and as such it holds it's own.

I just prefer some cutout scenes from this global picture - more concise, more to the point, less distracting.... at least to me.

As for the wide angle, someone once said that '....you're not close enough'. Just kidding!!!

I like the 28 too, with a 40'ish lens my preferred focal lengths.
 
I don't know. I think it's a good image. From a purely documentary standpoint, it tells the story well, which is really the deciding factor of an image for me.

But every day, I see images that accomplish that goal. I'm not faulting the photographer or trying to take anything away from him, but to me the image is no better or no worse than the thousands of documentary/street/photojournalistic images made every year around the world.
 
I wasn't familiar with Joel's pictures or his photographic interests/project(s) but having viewed Michael's link to his Flickr page I think it does both him, this particular image and what he may be trying to highlight a bit of a disservice to comment too heavily on this one image in terms of whether it's really successful. I get that this all comes from the social media and Guardian chatter about 'master painter' etc but his pictures as a whole give a far better understanding of where he's coming from.

I was a big admirer of Maciej's Cardiff project, if only for his nerve. Speaking of which, and with no immediately to hand evidence, I read an interview with Maciej stating that he often had a little sharpener or two to give him the courage to get and feel involved. I'll post a link if I can find it.
 
mfogiel said:
If you like the images of Brits' "ordinary excesses", then you might enjoy Maciej Dakowicz's book "Cardiff After Dark", which is filled with this stuff:http://www.maciejdakowicz.com/cardiff-after-dark/
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Thank you for that link - a great set of images that both repulse and attract at the same time.

I don't see anything there that quite compares composition-wise with Joel's photograph though, which I think works because it takes commonplace scenes such as those depicted by Dakowicz and captures something else.

The comments here have been fascinating - there's clearly a wide range of responses being generated by individual's reactions, whether from a subject-matter perspective as well as on technical aspects, social observations, comparisons, recollections/reminiscence, composition, and so on.

That to me is the sign of a good photograph - one that can generate such a range of divergent responses on this forum (and in plenty of other places). Each one adds to the overall appreciation of the work, whether you personally agree with the view or not.
 
mfogiel said:
If you like the images of Brits' "ordinary excesses", then you might enjoy Maciej Dakowicz's book "Cardiff After Dark", which is filled with this stuff:http://www.maciejdakowicz.com/cardiff-after-dark/
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Excellent! Thanks for pointing those out. I think I ran across Dakowicz' stuff in the past - seems to have a business 'teaching' street photography, sort of like teaching people how to have sex. ;-)

Cardiff looks like a blast. Have never been to Wales, now I need to make a pilgrimage when I make it back to the UK.

Randy
 
I'm not sure it's a masterpiece. However, it is a street photograph that has obvious mainstream appeal (based on the reception) and that's not easy to accomplish.
 
FWIW here's a link to Joel's website, there's a good sample of his portfolio available for perusal:

http://www.joelgoodman.net/

We may not all agree on whether or not Mr Goodman has shot a 'masterpiece' based on late-night Manchester, but I think it's a given that he's doing some important work documenting the late-night UK street (yob?) culture. And in my books, snapping photos in those volatile late-night situations requires cojones of steel. Good on him!
 
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