Take Three

Farmer's Face

I loved this guy the second I saw him. His blue eyes, wrinkles, big smile, the works. I made some candid shots but the light just wasn't working for me. He was game for a more direct portrait so I brought him to an open doorway and started shooting again. At first I made vertical shots but they just weren't doin' it either. Finally I spun my camera horizontally and it all clicked. I allowed him to just stare out at me and then in a flash of distraction his eyes glinted to the side. Click. I had my shot.

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Collective Visual Consciousness

Coffee Farmer

Nactwey has his Pieta, I have my Rockwell...sort of.

I haven't spoken with Jim but I have no doubt when he saw that terrible scene he was immediately struck by it's visual similarity to Michelangelo's work or others like it. When I scanned the crowd of this meeting in Kenya and I saw this man I was immediately reminded of Norman Rockwell's study for "Freedom of Speech". I know my guy should be standing and he shouldn't have his hat on but perhaps that is what he will do. This is the photographic back-story to that famous illustration. Plus, I just had it in my head. The details weren't important. As I looked out and saw that face and that hat, Rockwell's work popped into my mind's eye.

Next thing you know I'm going to be stalking the suburbs for a pre-turkey-dinner shot.

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Red Alert

Quick Shot

Yesterday's shot had some lovely reflected light and I remembered this one had that same warm red mud brick light. I was shooting inside a little coffee warehouse when a young boy came to the window to see what I was doing. I immediately saw the warmth of the light and the handsomeness of his face combine to make a potentially strong image. I swung the camera up fast, composed quickly and apparently decided to use just a sliver of the window in the frame. I can't say this was an altogether conscious decision. He didn't stick around long enough for a second frame so I'm glad I got it on the first.

Make pictures, think fast.

Keeping My Word

Tanzanian Girl

I shared a shot of this girl early in my trip and promised to share another one. Here it is. I don't do fashion or beauty much but this one sure feels like one. She has such an air of confidence and patience and the light bouncing off the mud bricks gave everything a lovely warmth.

Being early in the day, the light was still low in the sky. It was pretty hard to make a bad shot and then given the subject matter, it was mine to screw up.

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One Plus One

Classroom

There's something about an empty classroom that I love. The left image is taken by peering through a chain link window before I was allowed in. The right one is a close up of the teacher's desk. You can tell by the chalk that not a lot goes to waste in this class. For no particular reason I put the two shots together. They've got a nice commercial feel when they're together.

The board was covered with some pretty wacky logarithms that I couldn't begin to decipher even with the basic steps of logarithmic calculations written in English. Math isn't my thing. Instead, I enjoyed the even light coming in from either side of the room, the cool breeze passing through and the simplicity of the subject matter. All the while, quietly pondered the mystery of where the heck all the student were.

I haven't seen one uniformed school-kid within twenty miles of Kalinzi.

Make pictures.

Rwanda Radio Show

I heard an intersting piece on WNYC's On The Media about a radio drama in Rwanda.

Here's the link:
http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2007/07/06/02

It gives my earlier post some more context.

Make pictures.

Happy Accidents

Boy's Face

Both of these shots might have been rejected under certain circumstances. Neither is "sharp" in the traditional sense. The movement that is associated with a slightly longer shutter speed and the motion of either the subject or my camera gives both images a soft feel. At my Flickr size of only eight hundred pixels high, that's not always obvious so trust me on this.

While this isn't my typical approach to making pictures, every once in a while you get a "happy accident." (That's what my first photography professor used to call them and I've loved the notion ever since). To some in the fashion industry, this is a legitimate, desired and often very evocative way to shoot "beautiful" people. I've seen countless fashion and beauty ads that are unsharp yet still prefect. It's photography after all. It's a flexible medium. Lot's of things work.

Moving Woman

When shooting more by the seat of your pants and keeping the client's ultimate use of the images in mind, such aesthetic contrivances aren't the top priority. Simply put, these are mistakes. For the top one, I wanted the kid sharp but in my haste I didn't make the appropriate changes for a proper exposure. I'd been shooting in the bright sun most of the hour and then I saw this face in the shadow of a house and started shooting without regard for color temperature (I'm shooting JPEGs), or shutter speed. When I chimped it, it looked good. (You'd think by now, I'd realize almost everything looks good when it's only two inches across). Only later did the softness reveal itself. My initial disappointment quickly passed as I realized the image was still strong, maybe stronger with that slight motion. Color temperature wasn't an issue and I can't quite tell is it's the very slight motion or the very small depth of field that gives it that 'just soft' look.

The lower image is one I don't even remember making. I'd been passing over it in Lightroom. I scrolled along doing my editing without paying much attention to it but each time it would catch my eye. There's something strangely haunting about this one. If it keeps catching my eye, I'll give it some loving.
The special sauce really made it pop too. It's a keeper.

Make pictures and mistakes.

Eye to Eye

Coffee Farmer

She totally froze into the passport photo pose. I waited for it to pass, looking through the viewfinder. I could hear myself breathing, consciously calm. I was going to be patient. She had eyes that seemed made of glass. The coffee plants were reflecting in them. She wasn't shy like so many other women. She wanted to be photographed but I didn't want her too stiff. I wanted something natural. Something inviting. I knelt down on the ground to put my lens in shadow. Backlighting was an issue. I could hear others around us start to comment on our photographic stand-off. I let a few shots go just to see if that would loosen her up. It didn't. Then, maybe because of what someone was saying, she lowered he head and started to smile. Got it. I rose, thanked her and continued with my work.

I could have retouched the little bit of something on her nose but decided to just let it be.

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What's New is Old

Retro Portrait

Just above the washing station in Karaba, Rwanda I got a bunch of the curious kids to line up in front of a house. There were about ten kids in all that I shot as a group but then I swapped out my wide angle camera for the one with the telephoto lens attached. I selected these five kids because the radio gave it a real sense of place and time albeit not today in Rwanda.

Black and white "film," the simple, generic clothing and that radio combine to make it feel like an photo made during the FSA. While there weren't a lot of mud homes back then, I think you get the idea. It feels like something I've seen before as a kid flipping through some big hardcover Time-Life Book.

Incidentally, radios are the king of communication devices in rural East Africa. While cell phones are making a run for first, the radio still offers more bang for the battery.

Make pictures.

I Told You So

Wall-O-Onlookers II

As promised, here's another group of folks watching me work. They are all standing in the doorway to a coffee storage facility. I snapped this as I began to walk out and through the group. It's not exactly a perfect shot but I like the distribution of forms and the strong back light. Considering I didn't even look through the viewfinder, it'll do.

There are twenty seven faces and 28 bodies visible in the shot. Needless to say, being "followed" by a group like this makes for quite a challenge if a simple candid shot is your objective.

Check out the little set of eyes just to left of the kid in front wearing red. They're peeking out from just above the basket.

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Open Shade II

Coffee Shop Window

Back in Kalinzi again, I took some new folks to the little coffee shop that had provided me with some laughs a few weeks ago. When I got back to the roasting fire I noticed a face in the window basked in the open shade of which I'm so fond. I raised my camera and waited for some foreground smoke to clear. The guy raised his cup to his face to take a last sip and I snapped away. He held it there far longer than it would take to drink. I realized he was pretending for the camera. What a ham!

The extra time gave me a chance to shoot a few frames and to play with the composition a bit. I moved to the right so the light within the coffee shop was on either side of his head. I'm not totally sure the composition works but I'm sharing it anyway as another example of good open shade.

Make pictures.

See What I Mean

Wall-O-Onlookers

Just to prove that I'm not exaggerating when I say that I attract a certain amount of attention in some of the more remote areas, I am posting this wall of people. I was visiting a coffee drying station in Kayanza, Burundi when I was completely surrounded by curious onlookers. I like this shot because there isn't anything but bodies and faces in the frame.

I don't think there's any way of avoiding this fate given the time constraints I've been under. Maybe, with more time in these places, the novelty of a photographer in their midst would wear off.

I could post dozens of these onlooker shots. Maybe down the line I'll share a few more.

Make pictures.

Bag Ball

Homemade Ball

I posted a boy with one of these homemade balls a couple weeks back. This time I thought I'd just focus on the the ball itself. This one has a little shoelace or something in there too but it's still a perfectly good example.

They make them out of discarded plastic bags and you'd be surprised just how bouncy and resilient they are. They get lots of time being kicked around and end up no worse for wear. Keeping a ball in decent order isn't much trouble outside Rwanda and Kenya.

In Rwanda, these types of bags are illegal and the Nairobi City Council just voted to ban them. Not to deprive kids of balls, but because they are trying to reduce pollution.

Make pictures, don't pollute.

Night and Day

I had the cover of complete darkness and a hoodie to obscure my mzungu status the other night in a tiny village. I watched and listened as folks shopped for essentials, got tailoring done, or just chit-chatted over coffee and tea by candlelight and gas lanterns. It was a rare moment that I didn't stand out either because of my cameras or my skin color. The stars, bright as can be, were a perfect compliment to my anonymity.

PubliPhone

In contrast to that evening, I was in "downtown" Kayanza, Burundi waiting for a fellow passenger in a shared taxi when i decided I'd shoot some textures and the assorted oddities that abound there. This public phone kiosk struck me as a fitting subject. I was attracted to the handwritten numbers and simple, restricted palette. I didn't even notice the misspelling until later. Anyway, my behavior aroused the standard curiosity and one the smaller onlookers made his way into my frame. I can't say this shot is a total accident but it certainly wasn't planned.

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Front Seat Shot

Morning Commuters

I'm doing a little format expirament through flickr. I'm looking for a quicker way of posting and since my flickr stream has been discovered, I might as well embrace it. Consider this a test.

I haven't had a lot of luck shooting out the front windows lately. I do it a lot when I'm traveling but lately my successes have been few and far between. This shot, taken in the morning on my way to the Burundian border, is one of the better shots but still not really cutting it. Maybe it'll grow on me.

Part of the trouble with the windsheild shots is the bouncing of the vehicle on the crappy roads makes is hard to bring the camera to your eye without it smacking into your face. Even if you get it there, it's virtually impossible to hold still to compose. At least the subject matter is interesting. The truck is cool looking and the clouds speak to the early hour.

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Barefoot and Happy

Chasing Cars

We packed eleven people into the Land Rover yesterday so I volunteered to nestle myself into the space between the back back seat and the window, a place normally reserved for baggage. Only moderately uncomfortable (really), it provided a perfect position to watch the wake of our passing through the back roads of the "coffee highlands." That wake was almost always children running to see us pass or when moving slow enough, running after us. Unaffected by the dust or exhaust fumes, these kids would cautiously but speedily run at our pace.

I raised my camera without being able to see through the viewfinder and snapped away, careful not to get the spare tire in the shot. I shot about ten frames and let it go at that. Not having the mobility or ability to compose or even chimp the images, I let the fates give me what they had. I later took a look at the shots and this one is far and away my favorite. It has a sense of urgency that, if you didn't know what it really was, looks like kids escaping a battle scene. Happily, it's nothing of the sort.

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Quality Control

Hands at Work

Taken at different times in different countries, this starts to get at the incredible amount of manual labor involved in coffee from here and many many other parts of the world. Coffee is simply incredibly labor intensive. Not in the a heavy-lifting or dangerous sort of way, it's just time-consuming and detailed. Imagine sorting through beans one by one and picking out the defective or otherwise poor quality specimens. Not with some machine, just your eyes and your fingers. Tens of thousand of kilos of 'em. That's what happens with coffee.

The left side is the choosing of the cherries before they are pulped. One by one, the inferior ones get chucked. The right side is the dried beans about to get processed through the dry mill and shipped abroad. Hundred of folks, mostly women and children) were sorting through the dried beans. Not pictured is the additional sorting that happens on the drying racks just after the coffee is washed and fermented.

Make pictures, take nothing for granted.

Special Sauce

Folks want to know what the receipe for the special sauce is but that only gets shared with a select few who have promised to keep it a secret. My reasons are simple. Digital photography has no emulsions, no cross-processing, no pushing or pulling, nothing to give a photographer something distinctive. Something to call her own. Thus, I have my special sauce. You can too. Just go have fun in photoshop and come up with something for yourself. Save it as an action. Go to town. That's what I do. It's better that way.

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Deux Visages (Two Faces)

Burundian Face I

I'm not sure either one of these shots is good but I was having fun getting really close to some faces the other day. This first guy was hanging out at a coffee cleaning station and was totally cool about me taking his picture. He stared directly into the camera like 95% of everyone I shoot has been doing. I call passport photo syndrome. It's safe to assume that most of these folks' only experience with photography is with some form of identification photo. Be it a passport of some other photo-ID equivalent, I can watch the stiff, straight-ahead, serious face come out as soon as they know their having their portrait made. It can be a bit frustrating at times but more often than not it's good for a chuckle. Backing up my assumption, I learned that they refer to any portrait as a "passport photo."

Burundian Face II

That behaviored served me well for this guy. I wanted him straight-on and sure enough, he stiffened up and gave me his best passport pose. While this guy was great, I ended up sharing a cab with another man later in the day who made this guy look chubby-faced. I kept looking over at him and marveling that he could speak. It didn't even seem like there were muscles beneath his skin. So cool.

I didn't get a shot of him because there wasn't enough light. Otherwise, I'd have been all over it. Another one for the memory banks.

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Dirty Boy

Burundian Kid

I know, I know, another kid. Come on, this little guy rocks. Plus, he's the quintessential dirty kid that I see all over the place in these parts, especially on the sides of the roads. Their clothes are the color of the soil and when it's cold they pull their shirts up over their heads. If I've seen it once, I've seen it three dozen times in the past two days.

This specific kid was watching me as I shot the coffee folks sorting beans. I saw him and the first thing that went through my head was, "Oh my! There it is again. Do you think I can get a shot of him without him running away or breaking his expression when I bring the camera to my face?" There's only one way to find that out so up came the camera but my strap ended up covering the eye piece. A critical window of opportunity was closing fast. I could hear laughing from others watching. They weren't laughing at me. They were laughing at the little boy, my intended subject. I adjusted the strap out of my way figuring by now the kid would have either fled or broken into an embarrassed smile. He came into focus and to my delight and surprise, he was just as I'd seen him.

Very quickly the issue was another kid who was angling to jump into the frame behind him. I had to step to the side and lost a little bit of symmetry to my composition but maintained the gaze. I'll call it a win for me.

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Open Shade

Dry Mill Worker

The more you shoot, the more you recognize certain qualities of light. I have my favorites. When I saw this guy standing in the back of a truck unloading coffee I knew it'd make a good shot. The patterns of the coffee behind him and the perfect reflected light bouncing into his area combined with his simple dress and symmetrical stance was bound to give me something.

I made about five shots and this is the second or third. His expression changed a bit and some coffee dust wrecked the latter ones. I wasn't totally sure I had gotten it and returned to him a little while later but he had become overly self-conscious for anything to have come of it.

I ran my special sauce over the image and did a little burning an dodging to bring it to it's full expression. I think it came together nicely.

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Mahwenyi 360

Mahwenyi

My client loves panoramic shots so I stitched this one together last night. It seems a shame to do all that Photoshop work and not share it with everyone.

This is Mahwenyi, the last town in Tanzania before crossing the border into Burundi. I loved it and am excited to go back. I stood on a pile of dirt and spun around making about 15 photos. With any luck, upon my return to Tanzania, I can spend a little more time exploring some details of the place.

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Truant Texture

Kalinzi Texture

If you've been following along with my blog for a while, you know my penchant for textures. I have been shooting them here but not sharing them in lieu of all the portraits. This particular texture was one I went out of my way to get. I had seen it a few times as we passed in and out of Kalinzi and I finally spoke up to the driver and the other passengers that I needed to shoot it. The light was just perfect about an hour before sunset and I ran over, knelt down and made the shot.

I like it for a few reasons, one, it's a discernible place. Two, it's got great uniformity. And thirdly, it's a school sign. In my travels I have seen schools and school signs but there's no sign of students or even anything in the school structures. The distressed abandoned look of the sign speaks to the equivalent state of the coffee region's educational system. I may be wrong with this observation but I don't think so. Maybe it's just Summer vacation.

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Bujumbura Portrait

Bujumbura Boy

This photo is of some Burundian kid that I shot against a lovely white wall. I was just taking a walk around the city when I came upon a little sidewalk candy stand. I made some shots of it and a crowd gathered to watch and wonder why I should be shooting such a thing. With all those people around, I wasn't going to let a nice white surface go to waste. I pursuaded a few folks to pose for me. It became my sunset Streetstudio, Bujumbura style. That's only sunlight and a white wall.

I saw this kid's second-hand Santa shirt and the old fundraising anthem "Do They Know It's Christmas" rang through my head. Bob Geldof would be happy.

For anyone who cares, the second-hand clothing king is Eminem. I've seen his shirts on more folks than I've seen New York Yankee logos and that's saying a lot. They're everywhere. G-Unit and/or 50 Cent is in third place. The Lakers are popular with police and army folks in Burundi. It's all pretty odd.

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Moonday in Butare

The past few evenings have provided spectacular moonrises. Last night's lunar delight in Butare was hands-down the most beautiful moonrise I've ever seen. I debated getting my camera but then thought otherwise. It was simply one for the analog memory banks. Only an oil painting or some Star Trek-style artist would do it justice anyway.

And while we're on the subject of beautiful, I just read a fascinating article about aesthetics, computers and alike. Here it is in Wired Magazine. I'm reminded of Blade Runner and the artists who came up with "America's Most Wanted Painting" which featured George Washington, a deer and some other silliness. Let's hope the final results of these experiments end up with something more "accurate." Either way, that von Ahn fellow is one impressive thinker.

Make pictures well. The jury's still out on beauty.

Pretty Coffee Pictures

Coffee Cherries

The obvious thing that makes coffee so appealing to photograph is that it's grown in lovely parts of the world. Then when you get down to the details, it's just a very aesthetically interesting crop and beverage.

You can make a shot of coffee cherries anywhere and it'd be just about the same. To my eye, there's nothing unique about this Tanzanian batch but they always attract my attention for close-ups when I see a basket around. It's coffee just after being picked by hand and the first of many times that it will be touched and inspected for ripeness and quality. It's quite a process.

Dried Beans

Here in East Africa, the mud brick walls of people's homes offers the most lovely quality of light and tints everything a warm red. The structures are simple; walls, windows, doors. No other decoration. No other visual clutter. It's just about the coffee. Form follows function.

After being in the harsh sun, stepping into these structures offers a bit of refreshing coolness and a more intimate quality of light. In this shot, a single window is doing the trick. Just make some adjustments for exposure's sake and there you have it. Pretty coffee photos.

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In Rwanda

Crossing borders is always fun. Today was no exception. I had flashbacks to my hitch-hiking adventure through Central America as the Rwandan police went through everyone's bags at the border. It was a bright sunny morning and we all took it in stride. Good times. First impressions of Rwanda are that it's lovely. I've heard it called the Switzerland of Africa and so far, so good.

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For Me or Not For Me?

Cherry Sorter

I was at dinner with my client a few nights ago and demonstrated the power and ease of Photoshop. I let her chose an image that she thought might work for her marketing and communications efforts and I gave it my special sauce and cleaned up some unwanted clutter. I think we got something nice.

Personally, I liked the less smiley images but hey, it's marketing. Part of the fun of this medium is the abilty to explore each moment and see how time and expression can change the message one takes away from any given image. I am here to deliver for a client and that is my priority but in no way am I selling out. I am here because they like what I do and what I do, as far as I can tell, is respond to situations and try to make good pictures within that context. That's lucky for both the client and me. Plus, it's not like I work in an office that bans personal email or something. I can shoot coffee one second and a portrait of an old lady in the next. Two for them, one for me, etc. Excellent deal.

Make pictures, drink specialty coffee.