Zanzibar Portfolio, part 2

Like the first printing session, this one went surprisingly smoothly.  Well, once I had Ann help me troubleshoot why in the world my computer could not sent the images I wanted to print to the printer.  Did you know that if you want to use a hard line to send images to the printer you need to plug in the ethernet cable?  Ok, it wasn’t that stupid, because I “thought” I had plugged it in, but what I’d plugged in instead was a power cord, not the cord connected to the ethernet.  Oops!  

Anyway, I decided to print the images in the sequence I think they will be ordered in the folio.  

The first image was from the same spot where I took the image of the bike rider who had stopped to check out the previous nights football scores.  Despite appearing fairly well lit, the fact that a walking person is blurred is some indication of how slow of a shutter speed I needed to use to record an image on the camera.  

Fortunately, the young man looked over my way (unlike the man in the door) and I managed to catch his glance. 

After a bit I started seeing kids headed on their way to school.  I’d actually made several images of the open area below that didn’t have any people in the images.  As I was leaving (heading down the alley to the right), I saw these two young girls approaching, so I moved back to the position where I’d made photographs before, hoping they’d turn my way.  Unfortunately, they kept walking straight and I kept waiting for them to look over at me (the x100’s biggest flaw is a long lag time between shutter releases (learned from photographing the man in the door, who did, in fact look at me, except only after I’d made the image I used, and as he was looking at me I kept pressing the shutter with  . . . no response, until he looked away from me again.  Of course the shutter then fired!) so you have to wait for your moment when photographing people or moving objects  Which never came with these girls.  So as they turned away from me, I waited until the girl on the left was clearly isolated from the bright area beyond to press the shutter. 

I then headed back down the alley I originally intended to explore.  If you look at the images above and below, you’ll see the same blue wall on the left (above) now in the background behind the man walking (below).  I became enamored by the confluence of steps, decks and . . . whatever you call that thing to the left, and spent a bit of time photographing them as built architectural forms.  

I then stood there and waited, because when photographing scenes like this, a good approach is to find a great stage set, and then wait for the performance to come to you.  It didn’t take long until the man above turned the corner, then immediately followed by the sound of a squeaky bike and the kid.  So I waited until just that moment when all the foreground forms pointed at him.  

That became the focus of my development of the image, to have everything lead you towards the kid on the bike if at all possible.  The print itself is a joy to hold.  You can see every detail, to include the fact that he is looking at the camera!  This probably has to be my favorite image from the morning.

Wandering around some more led me past a school where a bunch of kids (boys) were gathered outside.  Not being brave enough to try and interact with the kids, I entered a near-by alley to catch a couple of kids passing each other on bikes.  The one coming towards me was heading towards the school.  Who knows where the other one wanted to go?  Here, the goal in printing was to try and bring out the interaction between the kids.  Consequently, despite the textured surfaces, I didn’t try to enhance them at all because doing so would lift the eyes away from the two bikers.

Well past the school I found a very narrow alley that was particularly interesting because of its textures and the red door.  Again I was playing with architectural forms trying to give a sense of the narrow alleys in Stone Town.  Particularly interesting in the image is that mesh screen to the right, which is visually very rough in the print.

Here the stage is beautiful (at least in my eyes) in itself.  It didn’t need more.

But that doesn’t mean more didn’t come.  As I was making the image above, I heard a scooter engine reverberating off the walls, uncertain from where it was coming from and having no idea of it would appear before me or not.  So I tried to maintain my position in the alley and framing of the image and I waited, and waited, and waited until it either passed or . . . appeared.

If you look at the print carefully, you can see that it’s ever so slightly shaken.  He was coming at a pretty fast pace and he flew by me with my back to the wall.  I guess I jumped as my shutter was firing.  Still, I’ve decided to include both images in the portfolio because they play off each other, with the alley and the red door tying the two together.

The last image is one of those that is a good candidate to practice what Ann and I had learned from our recent Charlie Waite workshop - thinking about why a photograph works and why it doesn’t.

The “doesn’t work” part is easy for this one - the kid is looking back to his mother, who is hidden by the wall to the right and was a few steps behind him.  He never stopped looking back either, and by the time his mother was in the frame, he’ was behind the bollard, and still looking away from the camera.  

Despite him looking away, I still like this image so I started thinking why?  Based on Charlie’s lessons, I started looking for relationships in the image.  The most obvious one, and the one that greatly influenced my development of the image is the mirroring of the red on the left with the boy’s red cap.  I the print, both reds pop out.  But there’s also the yellow patch on the wall, and the yellow colors on the background wall (and rain downspout).  And then there’s a tenuous connection between the light blues on the left hand wall and the blue painted entry way in the background.  What is not so evident on the screen, but clearly reveals itself well in the print, is the green bush just at the kid’s feet, and again at the base of the blue entrance.  

Shifting from the colors, there’s the pairing of the kid and the man on the motorbike in the background.  And then there’s the circular element of the manhole cover in the foreground, the top of the bollard and the kid’s cap (again).  

I also think that the foreground lines help accentuate the kid, who is clearly the focus of the image.  There’s the line of colors, leading to the bollard and then the kid.  There’s the ledge from the right angled sharply towards him, and then the jagged line of pavers leading to his feet.

One of the things Charlie discussed is the fact that there is nothing wrong about discovering relationships well after you’ve made an image.  As we train our eyes, we’ll begin to see more and more as we’re out photographing, but we’ll always miss some.  However, he (and I) believe there is an intuitiveness about image making, that something feels right at the time you’re making it.  You then try to perfect it as much as you can when making an image, but it’s often these relationships, unnoticed by your conscious self, that starts the process off.  There’s no reason not to try to come back later to ask yourself why this place stirred your curiosity.

So that’s it.  A dozen images (with an extra cover) from a morning in Stone Town, Zanzibar.  It feels good to have completed the project, knowing that there is something tangible in the end of it all.  

Now onto some of those other projects I’ve been thinking about . . . .