India Sept 2007 – Part#2 (Podcast 106)

by Martin Bailey | Oct 2, 2007 | Art Talk, Podcast, Travelogue

Today is the second part of a two part series in which we’ve discussed shots from a brief trip to India in September 2007. I was literally there for just three days, and didn’t expect to get much free time, but I was hoping to get some shots while there, so I took some minimal kit, comprised of a Canon EOS 5D and three lenses. Today we’re going to continue to look at some of the shots from the trip and I’ll explain my thinking behind the shots and how I worked the situation. The sounds we were played in with is the same as last week, which is a snippet of something I recorded with my smart-phone in the every busy streets of Bangalore, the city I was visiting.

So to briefly recap, that I had used a strategy that I explained last week to get people used to my being in the Madibala Market, which is where I was photographing some portraits. It’s not really important that you listen to last week’s episode before this, but if you’d prefer to listen in sequence, you might want to go back to episode 105 for full details. Anyway, what I’d done was basically walked through the market with my camera hanging around my neck on the strap, and just said hello and smiled at people as I walked through. This was really just to get them used to the idea that there was some foreign guy wandering around with a camera, and this would reduce the shock if I did speak to them later on. Despite the visit being literally just for 20 to 30 minutes, this strategy really paid off as I found it not only easier to talk to people on my way back through the same stretch of market, but I found people calling out to me, asking me my name and what I was doing there. I’d captured a couple of great portrait shots already by this point, and was kind of on a roll by the time we pick up the trail here.

Fishmonger’s Son

Let’s take a look at shot number 1538, which is the last shot from the family of fish mongers that we looked at some photos of at the end of last week’s episode. Here we see another kind of tough guy type shot, but this time the son was really almost breaking into laughter as his Dad, I think, was acting up behind him, as we can see in the bokeh in back here, with his hands up in sort of a pantomime ghost like gesture. This young man was very up for having his photograph taken and was kind of shoeing the rest of the family away as I continued to position him in such a way that would give the least distracting background. I was concerned about the poles and blue plastic sheets that were making patches of colour behind him, and had just about found a good spot, with just one pole visible, and the Dad came in and did this. Eventually though, on looking at the results, I find that I prefer this over the other shots, as the expression on the young man’s face really brings back to me the frivolity of the whole exchange with this fun loving family

I was shooting with my 85mm F1.2 lens at F1.8 with a shutter speed of 1/500 of a second at ISO 400. I could of course have gone much slower, but as we saw last week, some of the shots were actually under the cover of the market stalls and with much slower shutter speeds, and because I was working in such variable light, I just set the camera up in Aperture Priority, and ISO 400 so that I didn’t have to mess around with setting instead of concentrating on interacting with the subjects and actually getting the shots.

A moment or two later, confident that I’d got a few good images, and also not wanting to keep this family from their work much longer I thanked each of them and again shook their hands, and moved on. It was only later, on looking at the resulting images that I realised that the hands I was shaking had moments before been holding those big, not quite sweet smelling fish. Having grown up playing in pretty much ever muddy stream, woods and even coal hills near my home in England, I’m not particularly the most fastidious person in the world either, so it didn’t particularly bother me. It was much more important to me to show my gratitude for the photos and the human exchange that to worry about keeping my hands clean. Actually that reminds me of something else related to this. When I walked past this fish stall earlier, I noticed that there were a huge number of flies feasting and probably laying eggs in the fish laid out of the table. Bangalore is not particularly close to the coast, and with the transport infrastructure also being far from adequate, I’m sure it takes quite some time for the fish to even make it this far. Also there was of course no refrigeration in the market, so the flies were really just able to have a field day. A little off-putting when you think of this by Western standards, but I have never been one for judging other people and other cultures by my own standards. I had mentioned this in fun that night though over dinner in which one of the many curries we were eating happened to be a fish curry. An Indian friend told me though “Martin, we have the perfect cleansing procedure for all meat and fish”, and we looked directly at each other and at the same time said “curry”. Originally the reason why people in India curried things was to keep it edible during long periods of storage. In England, people like relatively salty food because we stored meat in large barrels of salt to stop it rotting. It’s the same thing. The necessities of the past have shaped our culinary cultures today.

Anyway, as I mentioned last week, the whole shoot was not plain sailing. Although most people were very open and obliging, and allowed me to take their photograph, I approached one man with a small child playing on top of a cart and asked if I could photograph the child. Although he looked as though he wanted to allow me to proceed, he refused almost immediately. I was a little puzzled by the conflicting expression and actual reply, but of course I just said OK and started to walk away. As I walked away, I could hear the man’s wife saying something to the man and turned and saw him kind of reluctantly refusing his wife too. Later I heard from Shashi, the guy from my Team in Bangalore with my day-job that was walking with me, that in India, some people believe that photographing children is bad luck. Basically it is customary to display a photograph of a person that has died and decorate it with garlands of flowers, and every time you photograph a child, you are making more images that can be used for that final post-death ceremony, and therefore shortening the life of that individual. Shashi says that this man definitely wanted me to photograph his child, as we could tell from his expression, but felt it necessary to refuse based on this custom or belief. With this information it all made perfect sense.

Let’s look at image number 1539, which I shot a few moments later a little further along the market. This is the first of two shots of the same father and son that I uploaded. I was still using an aperture of F1.8 with ISO 400 and this gave me a shutter speed of 1/640of a second this time. I had kept the aperture wide to through the background as far out of focus as possible. You can see that there are lots of patches of blue and other colours there, and I wanted to reduce their shape as much as possible. I’d seen this little boy also playing on top of a cart and asked the dad if I could photograph him. I was surprised how little I had worried about the rejection from the last person I approached, but I think this was partly because I was on a mini-high from the success I was having, and also because of the kind way in which the last person had refused. This guy was very accommodating though, and basically just picked up the little boy and posed him for me. I would probably have preferred just the boy playing on the cart, but I didn’t want to contrive things too much. The man obviously wanted to be involved and it’s his boy after all. Still quite a nice shot I think, with the boys big cute eyes in sharp focus, at least the right eye, which is closest to the camera. I had to rotate around the subjects a little to get the boy and his dad as parallel as possible to avoid the dad being too blurred. As it is, he’s a little soft, but is sharp enough to be able to appreciate seeing his features and the boy is perfectly focussed, as I say, on the nearest eye.

Father and Son #2

On turning around from shooting this, I saw a man sitting in his stall weighing something out, and have uploaded an image of him, but I’m not going to talk about it today. The next shot I want to look at is number 1541, in which we can see a great looking man with a wonderful red apple backdrop. The guy in the photo I just mentioned that was weighing stuff actually pointed down to this man who was sitting in front of the next stall, and shouted something out to him that I didn’t understand, but as the man kind of sat up straight, in preparation for a photograph, I assumed he was game and confirmed that it was OK. I first crouched down to his right, kind of instinctually as that was the direction I was coming from, but then I realised that this bank of stacked up apples would make a nice backdrop, and moved around to his left. I shot three frames, and in the first he was looking straight at me, and the second two he was looking straight ahead, kind of unaware of me. I chose to upload the first, as it maintained the brief human connection that I was enjoying. I used the same settings as the last image for this shot too, so the nice wide aperture had thrown the apples out of focus quite a lot, but we can still make them out for what they are, but keep the focus of the shot, pun intended, clearly on the gentlemen who is the main subject. Again, I showed him his portrait and got one of those Indian head shakes where they swing the head quickly sideways, while facing forward, which is a gesture of both affirmation and gratitude. And once again, I shook his hand, and said thank you, and moved on.

Apple Man

Literally again just moment later, I asked the lady at the next stall, who was also laughing as I moved closer, if I could shoot her portrait. She then gestured with her hand for me to wait and went inside the blue plastic sheet that was pulled down over the front of her stall, and came back with two incredibly small and incredibly cute children, that we can see in shot number1543. I shot about 8 frames to these wonderful kids, and chose this one to upload. The young girl had the sweetest eyes, as does her older brother, but in this shot, she looked away from the camera briefly, with a kind of cheeky grin, as her brother pushed something into his mouth also with a bit of a cheeky grin showing through. Still with a very shallow depth-of-field from the F1.8 aperture, I had to move around a little to keep the two subjects parallel to the film plane, and here as the girl swung around forward to face more towards her brother, I ended up only with her right eye, the furthest from the camera in focus, and the left eye and this side of her face is slightly soft, but I kind of like this too. When viewed large it is nice to work your way into the shot and find the in focus eye. After about eight shots I was thinking that I’d like to switch to portrait mode, and as I started to move and rotate the camera, the young girl got a bit upset with this big foreigner snapping away in front of her and turned away kind of half crying. I of course didn’t want to upset anyone so I said sorry and stuck my hand out. The older brother shook my hand with his tiny hand, and this calmed the sister, who also put her even tinier hand out, which I also shook while saying thank you, and decided it was time to move on.

Brother and Sister

That is the end of my brief shoot in the Madibali Market. My strategy of just walking through the market was also quite a success I’d say. By the time I made my way back through the market with everyone having seen me, and then also with the kind of snowball effect of the laughter from the next stall as I interacted with all the subject, it really turned out to be a magical time for me, that I won’t forget in a hurry. There are a few other shots online, and if you want to take a look I’ll put a link to list them all in the show-notes. One thing I have made up my mind to do is to go back to this market again on a future visit, and next time, I am going to go armed with a bunch of 5×7 prints of the images made here, in the hope that some of the subjects will be there again. I don’t know how regular the same people turn up, but I would just love to hand them photographs of themselves as another way to show my gratitude. Of course, it’s not just the photograph that would be the token of gratitude, but the fact that I will go to the trouble, although very minor, to create the photos and search out the subjects again. I hope that this will reinforce the notion that I have respect for the people that allowed me to photograph them, and value the exchange we had, however brief

Before we finish, I want to look at two of the six or so shots that I have uploaded that I shot from the plane both on my way out and back from India. The two we’ll look at now were from the last few minutes as we approached the Narita airport in the Chiba prefecture, with is across the Tokyo bay. The first one is actually shot south of Tokyo, and that is image number 1548. Here we can see Mount Fuji poking out of the clouds in the top right, with what is probably the mountain range in the Yamanashi prefecture behind it. The dark areas that we can just see poking out from under the clouds to the center left is the probably the Izu area, and in the foreground we can see the island of Ohshima, with its airport landing strip, about half way into the bottom left of the frame. I shot a few other images with the whole of the Oshima island in it, which I thought were pretty cool but I opted to this one, I guess just because of the feel of the clouds and Mount Fuji, and possible also because it felt better to leave out part of the island, leaving something to the imagination. Actually it is a bit strange saying Ohshima island, and shima just means island, and Oh means big, but it would seem even stranger just saying the Oh island, or totally translating it into big island, especially as this is the name, and so shouldn’t really be translated anyway. As for the settings for this shot, I was in Manual mode for control of the lighting, and was using my 70-200 F2.8 lens at 115mm here. The aperture was set to F9 to give me nice clear shot, sharp throughout the image at this distance, and I had a shutter of 1/250 of a second, with ISO 100. Had I used Aperture Priority here I’d probably have had to use around plus one stop of exposure compensation to stop the meter from making this scene too dark. It was very bright, and I wanted to represent the scene that way. I did have to play with the contrast a little though to bring Mount Fuji out a little as it was a little bit washed out.

Fuji with Ohshima Island

River in Chiba Prefecture

I actually uploaded another shot with a small island called Toshima in the foreground, and in its entirety, which is pretty cool, but we won’t look at that today. If you are interested please do stop by martinbaileyphotography.com and take a look. The last shot I want to look at today though, is number 1549. This is literally just minutes before we touched down. The request to turn off all electronic devices had just been announced, and the landing gear had bumped and banged its way down, and I’d actually put my camera into my camera bag at my feet, when I saw this river coming towards us. I could not resist getting my camera back out in case this came to something, and indeed, the sun being just at the right place in the sky lit the river up in a beautiful golden orange colour, and this lined up perfectly with Mount Fuji in the background and the clouds and sun’s rays hitting the misty area below the clouds really work for me.

The thing that I am a little disappointed with was that the banking of the plane as we swang around to the left was making for a bit of a bumpy ride at this point, and I was finding it difficult to keep my horizon straight. I had framed this quite tightly at 100mm with both edges of the river in the frame, but I had to rotate the image slightly to get the horizon straight, which meant cropping the right to the right slightly. It’s not a huge issue, but a little annoying as I actually had it in the frame. As I was shooting this though, a member of the cabin crew came by and asked me to put my chair up straight, as I’d been so excited shooting that my seat was still slightly reclined, so I moved the camera away from my eye for a few seconds to straighten my chair. By the time I looked back, the moment was gone, but luckily I salvaged what is still a great shot in my humble opinion, by doing a little bit of rotation in post processing. I also played with the contrast on this some to reduce the slightly washed out feel of the image, but this was nowhere near as bad as with the previous image.

I guess I wanted to add on this that I’ve kind of proved here that you can get some great shots from the inside of a plane when conditions are right, or close to it. When I showed these to a friend here in Tokyo they said that whenever they take photographs from a plane they end up with a reflection in the window. I was lucky here in that the angle of the sun was acute enough for the light from the window to be hitting the arm of my chair and not the camera itself. Even if my camera had been directly catching the sun though, the same rule that I’ve mentioned before for shooting through glass applies. If you make sure you have a camera hood one, and put it right up against the glass, you will greatly reduce the possibility of anything reflecting back into the window. Without anything actually reflecting through the window you should be able to shoot away to your heart’s content without any issues. One thing that might work against you though, is that plane windows tend to have a second plastic window inside, and quite a large gap between it and the real external window. This introducing a problem in that you will be more likely to reflect in the real window because you can’t get right up to it. If that happens I guess you could try moving so far back that the light no longer hits you, but that will greatly reduce your field of view through the window, so you might just be out of luck. I was in luck on this day though, so came away with a few nice shots to round off my brief trip to India.

So I hope you enjoyed this two part series. I enjoyed putting it together. As I make these travelogue type Podcasts I realise that I’m also making a kind of audio diary of my photographic adventures, which is definitely very special for me too.

A quick apology for the Web site problems AGAIN, over the last weekend. I received a mail on Thursday asking me to move our sites again, only a month after I moved our second server to the same provider that I have our audio file server with. This kept me up until almost 3AM on Friday night and really ruined a large part of my weekend as it was totally unplanned. Needless to say I was a little peeved, especially as problems persisted until Monday, so sorry about all that. Hopefully its now all over, and hopefully won’t happen again for some time. Touch wood! The Documentary/Photojournalism Assignment is now closed for entries and voting is turned on until the end of Sunday October 14, just about anywhere in the world. At that point I’ll create that week’s podcast to announce the winners and to announce the theme for the next assignment, so stay tuned for that. Please do go over to www.mbpgalleries.com to vote as well. There are some great images in the assignment gallery which you can find just over half way down the top page. whatever you’re doing — Bye-bye.

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India, Sept 2007 – Part#1 (Podcast 105)

by Martin Bailey | Sep 26, 2007 | Art Talk, Podcast, Travelogue

In September 2007 I was lucky enough to go for a brief business trip to Bangalore, India. I was literally going to be in there for just three full days, and didn’t expect to get much free time, but I was hoping to get some shots while there, so I took with me my Canon EOS 5D, and my 16-35mm F2.8, my new 85mm F1.2 and my trusty 70-200mm F2.8 lenses. Not exactly travelling light by some people’s standards, but for me, this is the bare minimum I can leave the house with if I’m thinking I might have a chance to shoot. Anyway, today and next week we’re going to look at some of the shots from the trip as I explain my thinking behind the shots and how I worked the situation. The sounds we were played in with by the way were recorded with my smart-phone in the every busy streets of Bangalore.

The main reason for my visit was to meet with a new team that I’m setting up in Bangalore with my day-job, and to meet a team in a separate company that we’ve been working with for some time for a lunch. Some of the people that I met have actually spent extensive time with us in Japan, to the point that I’d definitely call them friends, rather than business acquaintances. We’ll take a look at a portrait of him in a moment, but first, let’s look at a photograph of the hand of a friend of mine called Namdev. This is image number 1527. This painting or dying of the hand is called Mehandi, and what we see here is somewhat faded as it’s a few days after it was done. I hear that the hand is died using leaf sap on special occasions, and on this occasion it was to celebrate Namdev’s getting engaged, which I was really pleased to hear. Apparently this is not only decorative, but also because of the disinfecting properties of the leaf sap it is also done to cleanse the hands for the ceremony too.

Mehandi (Hand Painting)

I tried a few different shots, and to be honest don’t know if this really works either, but I did find a nice natural colored lace curtain by a window and asked Nam to put his hand up there, and shot it with my 85mm F1.2 lens with the aperture at F2 so that we could see some of the detail of the pattern in the curtain as the light shined through it. I selected an ISO of 200 because it was quite dark in the room, and was in Manual mode, to give me full control over the exposure, because the scene was back lit. Well, actually not just because it was back lit, as I tend to shoot in Manual mode a lot, but I would definitely switch to Manual mode or use exposure compensation in situations like this anyway.

A Happy Man

I selected a shutter speed of 1/80 of a second, because I was hand holding, and keeping the old rule of using the focal length as the minimum shutter speed for a non-Image Stabilized lens in mind. You know, 85mm lens, 1/80 of a second is just about as slow as you want to go without risking some camera shake. Most of us could go slower, and indeed I do in some of the shots we’re going to take a look at today, but this is a good rule of thumb to keep in mind.

In the next image (left) we can see Namdev all happy and content now that he’s engaged to be married, and that he has a nice manly 300dpi 7 o’clock shadow there. I’m happy with the overall yellow feel to the shot, with his shirt almost matching the lace curtains here, and the nice shallow depth of field from the F2 aperture throwing everything from the back of the subject to the curtains out of focus. I did actually lengthen the shutter speed to 1/50 of a second here, kind of contradicting what I just said about the focal length as the shutter speed rule. I wanted to keep his face relatively well lit as we were further into the room now, so the light from another window was not really falling on his face so much. I just kind of tightened up, and still the shot is very sharp, so I’m happy enough with this.

After meeting with the larger team, I was heading back to our offices, and a few of the elements outside of the car kind of came together a little, so I quickly snapped image number 1530, in which we can see a small figurine of the Hindu God Ganesha.

Dashboard Ganesha

Every car that I’ve ridden in, in India to date, has one of these or a variation of it. Very often too the driver will buy a string of flowers like this and hang it from the rear-view mirror and encompass the figurine with it. It seems that these flowers are changed like once a week or so, and are a very nice natural air freshener, giving the car a beautiful fragrance for a while. Here I just opened the aperture right up to F1.2 with an ISO of 100 and shot this for 1000^th of a second. I had now changed to Aperture Priority mode actually, in preparation to shoot in various levels of light shortly after this, in the Madibala Market. To set the stage for the next few photos, let’s look at image number 1531, that I really shot more to give you an idea of the scene that we’re about to walk through.

Madibala Market

What we can see here is a small portion of the Madibala Market, which is pretty much dedicated to fruit and vegetables, but also has a few other stalls intermingled. I’ve passed through this market many times during previous visits but never been able to stop the car and get out. This time, towards the end of a pretty busy day, I was just heading back to my office and stopping here for 20 or 30 minutes would just mean that I had to stay another 20 or 30 minutes to clear up my remaining tasks for the day, so I decided now was the time. I’d actually had this market in mind from the start, and I have to admit, this possibility was even a part of my decision to buy the 85mm F1.2 lens recently. I left the car with just the 85mm fitted to my camera and no other lens.

In addition to this first shot, I shot one other of a young man handling the flowers that we saw around the Ganesha figurine earlier, but then I move to my plan, which is what I wanted to talk about a little here. Most of you that have been listening for a while know that I’m not a big portrait shooter. Part of this is because portraiture has not really interested me much in Japan, though I’ll shoot the odd portrait when possible. The other part, and the main part for me, is that I am uncomfortable with approaching people to ask if I can photograph them. This is a fear that most of us have, or have already overcome. It’s not that I’m shy to the point that I won’t speak to people. I generally tend to smile and interact with people relatively easily, but I guess it’s that ever possible fear of rejection, being told “no”, that I’m anxious about. I also think of other people’s feelings, possible excessively, and I don’t like to patronise people. It’s probably unavoidable to an extent, but I’d hate for the people that we’ll look at in the next few photos to think that I’m a cold person, only wanting to steal their likeness and move on.

During my first few visits to India I shot many images from a moving car, including some of my portrait work, but the more I think about this, the more I hate this way of shooting. It’s cold, and uncaring and to be honest, I’m thinking now that it’s probably just downright rude. The more I come to terms with my own anxiety, about asking, the less I’m prepared to just snap off shots from a distance like a heartless sniper. My plan for this mini-shoot was to get as close to the subjects as time would allow, and my tactic was to add a buffer. After the first two shots, I decided to simply walk through a section of the market, and let the people around see me, with my camera, to get them used to the idea that there was a foreigner photographing in the market. I was with a guy from my team in India called Shashi, and we basically did just that — took a steady walk through the market. I made a point of doing what I’m comfortable with, which is smiling and saying hello, but made a stronger point of not asking to shoot any photos at this stage. As I passed and said hello to a few of the subjects that we’ll see in a few moments I was incredibly excited at the prospect of photographing them, but I kept my camera firmly in front of me, hanging from its strap around my neck, idle, but there for all to see.

Clothes Merchant

We got to the end of the street in a steady ten minutes, and that marked the end of this portion of the market. I’d not shared my strategy with Shashi, as this would have put pressure on me to come up with the goods, and I didn’t want to add any more pressure to my already pretty anxious frame of mind, but the lack of being in on the plan led him to ask if I wanted to cross the street and look at the market on the other side of the road. I said no of course, continuing that I wanted to walk back through the same stretch of market, which is what we did. The first image from that short walk back is probably the best portrait shot that I’ve made to date, and that is image number 1532.

I’d had a brief exchange with a man who told me his name was Ata Ula, and I’d told him my name and asked if I could photograph him. He obliged, but unfortunately it wasn’t sharp. I don’t know if I’d moved or he had, but the focus was off, by enough to render the shot useless. This is a great shame because it looks like a good portrait shot until you look at it closely. I remember feeling that I wanted to shoot a few more images, but I have to admit, the main thing on my mind was photographing the man sitting next to him on their clothes stall, who turned out to be Ata Ula’s father, and that is who we can see in this photograph.

I’d raised the ISO to 400, as most of the subjects were under the cover of their stalls and it was not a bright day. It was pretty overcast in fact, and had been raining on and off. Because of the varying levels of opacity in the plastic covers on the market stalls too, I’d decided to use Aperture Priority for speed as I also didn’t anticipate any troublesome high contrast conditions. I opened the aperture up to F1.6 for a nice shallow depth-of-field, and this gave me a shutter speed of 1/125^th of a second, which was just right. I got the focus spot on this time, with this amazing mans eyes perfectly sharp, along with the majority of his face. The tip of his nose and eyebrows start to get a little soft, but that’s fine. It’s the eyes and that wonderfully aged complexion that I wanted to capture, and I did that how I wanted to. No disrespect to this gentlemen’s son, but had I messed this shot up, I would have been incredibly disappointed. It went well though, and I feel very lucky to have had the chance to photograph this incredibly handsome man.

One of the wonders of digital of course is being able to check what you’ve shot immediately, but this also allows us to show the subject immediately too, which is what I did at this point. As I showed the men their photographs they smiled and did one of those Indian head-shakes that is a cross between nodding and shaking one’s head. It took some getting used to, but this is done as a sign of agreement and appreciation, and this made me profoundly happy. I’d not only been able to make a few incredible photographs, I’d made a connection, and made someone else happy too. I shook the hands of both men, and thanked them for allowing me to photograph them, and moved on.

Anyway, it seemed like my strategy was working! I had smiled and said hello to these two gentlemen on my way past the first time, and it was actually the son that started talking to me on our way back. I’m sure this is because they felt able to do so having seen me pass shortly before. After all, if they were open to just talking straight away, they’d have called out to me on my first pass, right?

A few paces further along and I was called out to again, by a group of people at a fish stall that I’d also seen on the first run. In fact, these people, I think all members of the same family, had tried to sell me some fish on our way out. I had smiled and politely refused. This time, they’d realized that I was not interested in buying fish, and they’d probably seen me photographing the gentlemen that we just looked at, so they just went straight to the “hey photograph us with our fish” mode. Of course, being asked to photograph them was something I had not expected but was more than happy to go along with. The first image of this family that I want to share is number 1534. Here we see the young man with a large fish, with the Dad to the right of the photo with another large fish, showing me the cross section of the fish, probably appealing to me how fresh the fish is. Now he has a nice photo expression, but we can see that the young man is kind of protesting about being pulled around by the man behind him, probably big brother. The neat thing about this photograph in my mind though is expression on the guys face as he makes a kind of cut-throat gesture. With the line of their sight we have a connection with me, the photographer, but they also opened up and had a bit of a mess around with each other as well, making for a nice interactive exchange.

Fishmonger Family – Cut Throat

As there were a few people in the shot, I had deepened the depth-of-field slightly by changing the aperture to F2.8. I was further away from the subjects this time, so I didn’t really need to go any smaller than this. The shutter speed at this aperture with ISO 400 was 1/200 of a second. In the next shot, number 1535, made a few moments later with exactly the same settings was also nice and interactive as the guy in the back placed his hand over the Dad’s head, making fun of him this time. The young man’s face was now in a serious, kind of tough-guy face, probably what he wanted to do from the start, and the Dad’s expression was totally unchanged. We also now have another older gentlemen coming into the frame in the far right, which adds another element of interest.

Fishmonger Family – Having Fun

Another Tough Guy!

At this point, another brother, came close enough to join in the fun, and I shot image number 1536. With a nice sort of half-smile, this young guy is a great looking subject too, and you can tell by his pose and his closes and chains etc. that he’s kind of playing the tough guy too, with the youngest brother. This shot in my mind has a nice gritty yet pure feel to it, but I kind of regret chopping of the hands in this and another shot of the younger brother that we’ll look at next week. I’m not too worried about this, but having framed it this wide I probably should at least tried going the whole way out and include the hands. Still, I’m happy enough with the shot. For this by the way I opened the aperture up a little again to F1.8, which gave me a shutter speed of 1/500 of a second, still at ISO 400.

So at this point, I’m going to cut this episode off, as I have too many shots left to talk about for one episode, and we’ll pick up the story again next week.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this first part of a two part series. I learned a lot from my experiment and gained so much from a human interaction perspective. It didn’t all go my way, but that is fine, and the last thing I want to do is upset someone. I’ll go into more details about that though, in next week’s episode.

Remember that the Documentary/Photojournalism Assignment is still on, with just a few more days left to get your entries in. You’ll be able to upload your entries until the end of this coming Sunday which is September the 30^th and at that point I’ll lock the gallery to uploads and start the voting for a further two weeks. So far there aren’t so many entries uploaded, but I’m hoping this is because everyone else, like me, is holding off uploading their images because they’re undecided in which one to upload, or maybe hoping to shoot something better before the deadline. I also think that this assignment has been much more difficult to shoot for, so I kind of expected a drop in participation. It would be great to be surprised here though, so please do get your entries in if you are sitting on the fence on something.

And that’s about it for today. The music we were played in and out with a track called Creation by a band called Shams. And with that, all that remains to be said is thanks for listening, and you have a great week, whatever you’re doing — Bye-bye.

Show Notes

The music in this episode is from the PodShow Podsafe Music Network at http://music.podshow.com/

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