The other day I posted some photos of the grounds of Werribee Mansion. A. and I really enjoyed exploring the old greenhouses that sat close to the flower beds, and the various lighting that the place offered made for some interesting portraits as well. These are some of those images.
Earlier in the year (yeah, it’s taken me this long to get around to posting these), A. and I went on a little trip down the Great Ocean Road. Just past Anglesea is an attractive rocky spine of a headland, at low tide surrounded by sandy flats. The rocks themselves have been weathered by salt, wind and water, and are riddled with holes and dimples, full of character.
While I was framing some beach shots, A. climbed up behind the outcrop and found herself a little window in the rock to peer down at me. The location appealed to me, so I let her pose while I fired off a bunch of frames. I was really pleased with the outcome.
There’s a number of things I really like about this shoot (aside from the fact that I happen to like photographs of my lovely wife 
). First off, I find the interplay between organic and inorganic really appealing- hard, lifeless rock versus fluid, living being. And yet despite this contrast, A. fits really well into the hole, and the shape of it seems to compliment her form in it.
I was using my 16-35mm wide-angle lens, usually a no-no for portraiture, as it tends to distort features unnaturally (especially up-close, where it can make noses bloom and hairlines recede). However in this instance, I kept really close to the rock but not so close to my subject, A., who stayed in the middle distance (which for that lens is about 5-10 feet away). The effect was to keep A. fairly well proportioned, but blow the rock right out, filling the frame, stretching it and (at closest range) blurring it. Oddly, this actually gave the impression of movement through the image, and making the frozen twists and boils of the rock appear fluid, another nice contrast. With A.’s hair catching a sniff of sea breeze, it gave an overall impression of motion and dynamism to an otherwise static scene- almost like a breaking wave frozen in time.
This next shot I like for the sheer fun of it. Again the wide-angle lens has played its role here, overemphasising what’s close to the glass and throwing all else into the distance. A.’s hand and arm are large, almost claw-like as she crawls out of the rock, and she seems disproportionately large compared to the rest of the scene. At the end of the day it’s just a fun image, brought to life by the distorting effect of the wide glass.
This next one I enjoy for the way the rock hole seems to mold to A.’s shape, framing her in a sliver of burning white. The different elements- blue sky, hard rock, fierce backlight, and A. herself, all contrast and yet work together to hold the image in a way I find very satisfying. You can see some lens fall-off in the bottom left corner, further developed by the shallow depth of field, which is a bit of a shame, but doesn’t rob the overall effect in my view.
And this last one would have to be my favourite of the bunch. In part because it’s just a lovely shot of my favourite person. But I also like how natural it feels, very comfortable and unstaged. I’m also very chuffed with the lighting and how it all came together. Shooting portraits contre-jour (into the light) is usually a challenging proposition unless you’re good at using fill-flash (something I’m still learning). The camera tends to overcompensate for the light behind the subject, darkening the face/body of the person you’re shooting, often to oblivion. Because the backlight was only a small portion of the frame here (A. and the rock both served to block most of it out) there was enough light on A. to keep her well lit and visible, with only minor tweaking in post-processing. The result, she looks like she’s emerging out of the sunlight, while the way her hair blows out to white and the frame of the sky behind her has a halo-like effect [avoid angelic references here]. All up, one of my favourite photos in recent times. But then I confess the subject leaves me a little biased… 
As always, thanks for swinging by, and hope you enjoyed.
Ciao,
-MA
Portraiture is something I’ve increasingly aspired to as a photographer. I love a good landscape- in fact, my landscape shots are often what people seem to enjoy in my shots. Portraiture is a different skill-set though. While light changes over a landscape in such a way that you may only have a few minutes to get the shot you want, the challenge of portraiture is even greater- you may have just fractions of a second to capture the image that you have in your mind’s eye. On top of that, a really good portrait often communicates far more power and emotion to the viewer than any landscape; it’s the human element that makes it special.
The basic rules all apply, of course. You want to think about composition (the rule of thirds is a pretty reliable starting point), colour (one of the joys of travel photography are the different colour palettes you can find in both the natural and urban environments) and lighting (shooting in the tropics presents visceral challenges with regards to fierce overhead lighting, washed-out skies and high-contrast backdrops, but dust and moisture can enrich late afternoon sunlight to make it magical).
I’m sharing some specific pointers I’d like to suggest for taking a decent travel photograph. They’re not exhaustive, nor are they unique to travel portraiture, but I reckon if you can nail these, you’re well on your way to capturing the sort of image you’ll want to bring home and share with friends and family when your adventures come to a temporary halt. (I’ll leave it to you guys to decide whether these shots fit the title or not…)
Note: All these photos were taken on a 3-day field visit in rural Niger in September this year.
1. Create a Connection
This is true with any portrait. I find the most powerful portraits are those where the subject is looking straight down the camera lens. It can feel (as a viewer) as though the person is looking straight out of the photograph at you. To achieve this, you generally need some sort of relationship with the person whose picture you’re taking. It might only be a momentary one- a glance in the street- or you may have asked the person to pose for you.
In travel photography you’re often communicating across language barriers, but respect is universal, so always put it into action. Just pulling out a camera and shooting willy-nilly is a sure way to upset people. I rarely take a photo where I haven’t signalled my camera (usually pointed upwards) and waited for an inviting smile or nod, or made eye-contact with the person and waited for them to acknowledge me in some way. If I sense hesitation or hostility, I smile and move on. Even asking in a foreign language, people usually get the idea of what you’re wanting and can communicate a reply.
While in photojournalism there’s a power and pathos that comes with shots of human suffering or deep emotion, I find the photos that people go back to tend to be ones where the subject is joyful. People are naturally drawn to beauty. With that in mind, have fun. Laugh with the person you’re shooting, give them a big smile, turn it into a game. That won’t work in all cultures: for many, having a photo taken is a serious business and they want to look their formal best. Kids, on the other hand, usually love it, and in many African countries they’re overjoyed when someone points a lens at them.
Earlier I’d asked this girl if I could take her picture, to which she’d agreed, and I got a really sweet little shot of her smiling shyly while clinging to the trunk of a tree. A few minutes later she came back to me with a cheeky smirk asking me if I’d take another photo, and when I raised my camera she giggled. I speak no Hausa and she spoke no French, but as you can see, the communication worked just fine.
2. Consider your Background
When you’re taking a portrait, the person is your main point of focus, but they exist in a context. In fact this is the major difference between travel (and candid) portraiture versus studio portraiture. With the latter, you control the background ahead of time. With the former, you need to manage it on the fly- itself a challenge that can be both satisfying and heart-breaking.
Background can become a part of your visual narrative, or it can distract from it, so think about the effect you want. Environmental portraits frame people in a shot with items that contribute to telling that person’s story. A merchant in a fruit stall, for example, may be best photographed standing with all her colourful pineapples sharply in focus. For this you probably want to use a wider-angle lens (not too wide, as wide angles distort images and can stretch facial features unnaturally) and a reasonably small aperture (f/8 and higher, light-depending). Again, the joy of travel portraiture is that backgrounds are often exotic and full of interest.
On the other hand, a child on a busy street may get lost in the clutter if you don’t defocus your background. Use a mid-range telephoto lens and open the aperture wide to get a really shallow depth of field, which naturally throws the background out of focus. Just make sure your point of focus is spot-on, or you may end up with a fuzzy subject too.
If the background is unremarkable you probably want to use this technique too. In the photo at the top of this page, the background was burning white sand- totally uninteresting and threatening to wash out the photo- so blurring it into white made the most sense. This has advantages (declutter and an element of the abstract) but also disadvantages (the photo is placeless and has no context).
In this first photo, I chose to use a really shallow depth of field as the background was fairly dull, and I wanted the farmer to stand out. Using a small f-stop number (f/1.8) also means that the part of the shot that is in focus is REALLY sharp. The blurred green trees give just enough information to let you know you’re in the countryside, but don’t pull the eye away from the man’s wrinkled face.
In this next shot, the girl is standing against the wall, so both she and the wall are in focus. The wall is painted with a map of Africa. Although the girl herself doesn’t stand out quite so much from the background, the colours and textures are pleasing to the eye, and the map itself tells a story and gives the girl a context which (in my opinion) adds something unique to the photograph that might have been lost had she been against an empty or blurred background.
In this third shot, the boy is in focus while everything forward of and beyond him starts to blur out. There’s just enough detail, however, to give him a context- the cows, the harness and the water containers, as well as the rural backdrop. Because he alone is in focus he still holds the viewer’s eye, but there are other elements in the image that contribute to telling the viewer something about who he is and what he does. Note: You could argue that this photo would have benefitted from a broader depth-of-field (something around f/4) to keep the cows sharp but still blur the background, and I’d accept that criticism, although I also like how isolated the boy is from everything around him; you can see just how precise the depth is by looking at how much of the yoke, front-to-back, is actually in focus before it blurs out.
3. Be Ready for the Right Moment
Facial expressions are fleeting, as are connections. If you’re in a place where you think you might see something interesting, have your camera out and switched on, with the right lens fitted, the correct mode selected, and your eyes scanning. You might be looking for a gesture, an emotion, or a fleeting glimpse of eye-contact. People may be moving. Think about your shutter-speed- will you be able to freeze motion given the light available to you? And think too about point number one and the importance of communication and respect; even in a crowded place, have you made eye-contact with the people you’re wanting to photograph, or made sure they’re comfortable with the camera? Stand-off lenses are all very well, but as a photographer you need to be asking yourself these ethical questions.
In both of these photos, these kids made eye-contact with me for just a few seconds where they were caught in a crowd of others. The children there had been watching me for some while and I’d been looking back at them and smiling, and noting those that smiled back at me and at the camera. I already had the aperture opened up so that when my opportunity came I knew I’d be able to isolate whichever children gave me a moment to photograph, and these two did.
4. Go for the Eyes
If there’s a cardinal rule in portrait photography, it’s this one. Eyes are all about moment and connection. They communicate emotion to the viewer, and a simple glance of a couple of degrees off-lens can make the difference between a missed opportunity and a wow moment. This is particularly true of close-ups.
For eyes, think about placement; rule of thirds is usually the way forwards here, so try and get one eye onto that sweet-spot at the intersection of the thirds-lines. An eye-line straight down the barrel is usually what I go for, and almost all of the portraits I’ve loved have involved that sort of eye contact. If using shallow depth of field, ensure that the eye itself is the point of focus. It’s all too easy to accidentally focus on the forehead or the tip of the nose, and even with a really strong facial expression, you’ll lose some of the punch of the image.
These two shots were both taken at a school in Niger (one inside the classroom and one outside), and they are both among some of my favourite portraits of all time.
5. Tell a Story
This is optional, but the difference between a techncially good photo, and a photo which makes people sit up and take notice, is that with the latter, they’re experiencing something new. The beauty of travel photography is that there’s always a story to be told, something new to see, something that’s exotic to the viewer back home, so try and think of what that story might be. A facet of daily life, a curious setting, some exotic produce, or just an unusual face that communicates a sense of place or time- it can be any number of things. Put this together with capturing the right moment and working on your background, and you’ll have a photograph that will really help you remember a place.
In this photo, I managed to combine moment, background, eye-contact and connection, and the setting was such that I’ve been able to capture a little slice of existence in this rural African village. Girls in Niger, as in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, are the ones mostly tasked with collecting water- even quite young girls like this one. Here, I love the colour, the bright light, her expression, and the pouring of the water all framed crisply against a blurred backdrop of other women and girls waiting at the well behind her (and again, contrast this with the image at the top of the page which has no background).
Travel photography- and portraiture- is a personal thing, and it’s up to you as the photographer to decide what you want to remember, and how. Really, if you take a photo, and it reminds you of something special, and you’re proud of it, that’s all that matters. I wish you all the best of luck out there, and most of all, I encourage you to have fun. If you’re not enjoying yourself with you camera, seriously, what’s the point?
It’s day three in the field. For the last two days, we’ve been spending most of our time looking at the nutrition program. It’s been a mixed mission. On the one hand, we’ve still got Mike and Cam, the journalist and cameraman, with us doing their story on the Niger nutrition crisis- and me (oddly enough). On the other hand, I’ve been using this opportunity to spend time with the field teams, check up on the work we’re doing, and orient myself well for the next three weeks of work here in-country.
Today, though, we’re all about the media stories. It’s been an interesting experience for me, watching how the news is made. Mike and Cam are both at the top of their respective fields and they’ve been a pleasure to work with- even if there are moments when I cringe at the thought of what the villagers who watch our antics must be thinking.
We going a little more into the background of Niger- and my background as well. It’s a nice angle for the story- an aid worker who was here in 2005 during the last crisis, returns in 2010 and comments on his journey, and what he’s seeing. So I’m doing a few pieces to camera, usually interviewed by Mike, either beside me, or perched to one side of the camera. When I’m not on camera, and because most of the things we’re seeing today are not part of my program responsibility, I’m a little off-duty, which is nice because I’m free to take photos. Which of course I do.
The work aid agencies like mine do is built around both long- and short-term realities, and each has to take the other into account. For example, although my focus is on acute malnutrition and how to make sure that hundreds of children in our areas of operation don’t die between now and November, the team also has to be aware of the long-term context. There’s issues of chronic malnutrition, health care, disease management, clean water, hygeiene practices, breastfeeding, and a host of other trends, changes within which are measured in years, yet which have a direct and tangible affect on our work. Likewise, when our colleagues in the development wing of the organization are designing their fifteen-year program cycles, it’s essential that these programs are built around the emergency contexts that are likely to arise during that time (such as acute malnutrition) so that the root causes of these emergencies can be tackled over the long term.
So the first place we stop is outside a small village on the horrendous road to Dakoro. I say horrendous, because the Senegalese are funding a road project to pave it all the way up. I remember this road from my time here. It was laterite- a bright red dusty unsealed track running due north for several hours. It was one of the more uncomfortable journeys to make, as the road was marred by rock-solid washboard, and you spent the journey trying not to let your teeth grind down with the jarring.
Ah the good old days.
Today, the road is under construction. The first few miles are now metalled, and the rest is undrivable. In fact, we spend most of the journey not on the road, but on a set of sandy tracks which drivers have been forced to forge off to one side of the road because it’s gotten so bad.
It’s a relief to branch off straight into the bush when we do. We’re accompanying a wizened farmer who’s one of the more entrepreneurial types. Instead of just growing millet, he’s planted acacia trees to stop soil erosion, as well as cassava (an edible root crop), melons, hibiscus, sorghum, and a bunch of other things too. We walk around his plot and he shows us what he’s doing. This is all good for the long-term growth of the rural areas, and the health of communities, if what he’s doing can be replicated to others.
I take a portrait of him which I love. He’s wearing a red-and-white chequered headscarf in the bright overhead sun, and his face is full of lines, evidence of a life lived hard. He’s looking at the camera, and I’ve stopped the 85mm lens down to f/1.8 so that the background is thrown out of focus and the details on his face are extra sharp. It’s one of my favourite types of portraiture, and one of the most satisfying when it works.
Our next stop- and photographically my favourite- is further north at a village with a second-chance school. In Niger, many villages don’t have schools, and those that do are often understaffed. Children who don’t enroll into primary school at the correct age are not allowed to enroll at a later age, and therefore if they miss registration one year (or in some cases, if they have no birth certificate) they miss out on being able to gain a formal education altogether.
These schools have been set up as a safety net for kids who’ve missed out through the normal channels. They teach the national curriculum, but teach it over four years instead of six, so that the kids can catch up sufficiently to be able to attend college (secondary school) when they graduate. The children themselves understand the importance of education (I always enjoy visiting schools in rural communities, because the kids understand what a privilege it is to be at one, unlike so many classrooms in Europe, the Americas or Australasia).
The children in Niger are beautiful. They’re graceful and have elegant features, and are a joy to shoot. I mean, kids are great most places, but I’ve always found the Nigerien children particularly endearing. These ones are no exception.
Mike and Cam set up some interviews with some of the children, and again I’m free to do some shooting. Which I do. Some more from this shoot (and some of my favourites from this trip- and for a long time) will show up on a later post.
From here, we visit a cereal bank. I was involved in setting up our cereal bank program back in 2005 (when I knew very little about them; the advice was coming from our local staff who had worked with them before). The principle is, you provide some sacks of food to a village committee when food is at its cheapest (right after harvest). The committee then keeps this food in a central location. If people in the village need food, they can buy food from the cereal bank at rates cheaper than the market rate- a benefit to the community- but still more expensive than the food was purchased for at the start of the year. If the bank is managed properly, the committee should have enough money to replenish the store when the next harvest hits the markets and grain prices are surpressed again. If they’ve done a good job and market prices have worked in their favour, they may even gain some profit which they can then invest in their own community development.
The cereal banks have come under fire at different times. When they’re not managed well, communities expect NGOs to top them up for them, so it can become a hand-out project if not carefully supervised. They’re vulnerable to market shocks and food shortages. However this one we visited had done well for itself. Over the last five years, only this year had they come to us for help to restock it, and that because the food crisis was so severe. We gave them a few extra tonnes of food- not a huge amount- and they reckon with that they’ll go back to being able to replenish their store again in the next harvest, in a few weeks’ time. Meanwhile, over 800 families in the community benefitted in some way from the bank’s work over the last year.
It’s nice (and remarkably rare) to be able to step back into a country many years after leaving it, and to see a project that you’ve contributed to in some small way having made a difference to peoples’ lives. I can assure you, it doesn’t happen often.
(And obviously, when the chats and the interviews are over, I head off and take a few photos of cute kids. )
On the drive back to Maradi, Mike and Cam want to recreate some background shots from the Dafur incident. Part of their piece on me will involve a brief re-telling of the ambush. They shoot some stylised footage of the vehicle in the bush, of us taking cover behind the dashboard, and of Idi, our driver, wearing my turban and menacing the vehicle. It’s all rather hilarious in its own way, four guys with expensive gear playing Cowboys and Indians making light of a very serious situation. But as we watch the sun start to kiss the tops of the millet stalks, we settle back into the bumpy ride and muse on yet another good day in the field. We’ve been lucky with the times we’ve had, and we all know it.
Tomorrow we drive back to Niamey. Ten hours. It’s going to be fun.
I’ve been in Niger for just over sixty hours when we board the flight in Niamey. It feels like my first time back in the field in a long time. I did some trips in Fiji back in June and had a brief trip through parts of Typhoon-devastated Manila this time last year, and before that, a few days in northern Sri Lanka at the climax of the war in early 2009. So it’s not surprising I’m feeling a little starved.
The day starts in typical third-world travel fashion. A dawn departure from the hotel, an arrival at a near-deserted airport where the only passengers were the dozen scraggly expat-types boarding the UN Humanitarian Air Service flight, and the mind-numbing bureaucratic protocols that are one of the great legacies the French left behind in West Africa, together with the French Foreign Legion, and great bakeries.
We squeeze onto the little 15-seater turboprop. The pilot is a ruddy-faced eastern-European. He might be Russian, he might be Bulgarian, but either way I do a nasal sweep for vodka before I’m happy to buckle my safety belt. I’ve heard the stories.
The flight is gorgeous. Ninety minutes at four thousand five hundred feet. The morning air is dead calm and we don’t bump once. In bright sunlight we see the Nigerien heartland laid out beneath us, everything from barren scrubland to fields dotted with vivid green, from round-hutted villages to monsoon-flooded wadis. We get a great view of Maradi town as we sweep low over flat-roofed mud houses arranged in tight grids. I can see garbage strewn down the familiar dirt streets where rain has washed it out.
We travel straight to the field, just time to swing past the Guest House to dump our bags and grab breakfast to go; Mike and Cam are still funneling omelette into their mouths when I usher them into the vehicle and we’re heading bushwards. It’s a ninety-minute trip to our destination.
The mission is two-fold. Mike and Cam are journalists from New Zealand reporting on the nutrition crisis. They’re using our program as a springboard to tell the story. As well as accompanying them as the interim manager of the program, I’m taking the opportunity to familiarize myself with our activites in the villages and see the context for myself.
For me, the trip out of Maradi is a series of flashbacks, a journey I’ve done countless times from my time here in 05 and 06. It hasn’t changed much, though maybe it’s a tad busier, and there are more broken-down trucks than I recall. It only takes us twenty minutes to lose the tarmac, and then we’re jarring northwards on rutted tracks into the bush.
We’re late to the village, and the program activities have waited for us to arrive. We pull up outside the health centre where the nutrition screening is taking place, and it’s all a bit daunting. There must be over a hundred mothers with children gathered beneath the shade of spreading green trees, not to mention the prerequisite hoard of older children who are there for the excitement of seeing the foreigners. They already know something’s up because a team’s gone ahead of us to get things set up for our arrival. Mercifully, we don’t get a song and dance to welcome us, and the screening starts straight away.
While the boys get their camera gear out the back, I wander over to the main screening point. Siradji is there, managing the operation. I haven’t seen him since 2006, when he was doing exactly the same job. His face lights up and we share an enthusiastic hug in front of a hundred bemused mothers still waiting for us to start weighing their kids. Most of them smile at the exuberance.
Mike and Cam work with Ann and George, our media reps, looking for interesting stories, while I check out the different parts of the nutrition program. We screen the children who’ve been referred to us by the health centre as exhibiting likely malnutrition. They’re measured and weighed, and then either dismissed or added to the program, depending on their health status. In the program, they’ll be given a weekly or fortnightly food ration, and their progress documented by health workers. Different activities happen at different stations, and it’s a setup I’m familiar with from five years ago. It’s all eerily familiar- except that there are far more women here than I ever saw in ’05. Plenty of sick kids too. One of the first on the scales is a visibly emaciated youngster eight months old who weighs 3.2 kilos- or what I did when I was born.
It’s a hot day. Which goes without saying. It’s Niger. The village is mostly sand, and that sand is white and burning. I have my camera and inbetween talking with staff and health workers, I take some photos. I haven’t done much of that recently either, and it takes me a little time to work into it, but the kids get a kick out of it every time I point the camera at them, so that makes the job easier, and a lot more fun too.
As always happens on this sort of exercise, after a while I start to feel a little awkward. I manage the program. My training is at a fairly high level. I’m not a technical specialist, and my role there is to get a feel for what’s happening, identify any problems that the operation might be experiencing, and make sure that they get solved. I’ll do much of that in meetings, trainings and from behind a laptop in a scuzzy office in Niamey. But out here in the field, I’m the token white monkey, just an odd foreigner walking around talking to people, taking notes and the occasional photo, and feeling utterly useless.
In fact, I feel like poo.
And then something funny happens. Siradji comes over. There are a lot of women, and some of them are impatient. They’ve been there for a while, and the screening is taking too long. Our two volunteers are totally overstretched and can’t get through them quickly enough. So Siradji grabs a measuring tape, and passes me a pen and a card, and we set up a second screening point under the trees.
I have a stack of cards. Siradji reads out the measurement, and if the child’s arm is below a certain diameter, they’re admitted to the program, in which case I note down their name, village and measurement on a health card and give it to the mother. I speak no Hausa and the women speak no french, so as he measures, Siradji asks the women the child’s name, and often as not he then needs to spell it out for me because it’s been a while since I’ve come across quite so many Abdoulayes, Fatoumatas and Ibrahimas.
I’m a glorified scribe. I’m ridiculously overqualified (and overpaid) for what I’m doing. In fact I’m probably thoroughly inappropriate, given my linguistic shortcomings (although as time goes on I get my ear in and can understand the names and villages straight from the women themselves).
But I feel useful. I’m doing something practical. I’m helping out. And I freaking LOVE it.
It gets intense. The women are all impatient, and as the line deteriorates into a mob, they grow rowdier. Children are being shoved at Siradji. Accusations of queue-jumping and unfairness are thrown about in banter which borders on being less than good-natured. I understand not a word of the chatter, but the tones speak for themselves. I’m not concerned beyond the fact that the disorder isn’t pleasant for the women. But as I sit there, I reflect on my situation. Sitting on a small chair in the sand on a roasting afternoon. Agitated women squalling in sharp tones in my ear. Screaming babies. We’re completely ringed in, hot bodies pressing so closely sometimes I can’t move my elbow to scribble on the little cards. The smell of sweat is a sweet odour that fills the nostrils with foreign scents. I am perspiring heavily myself, and can see the beads of moisture on the women’s scarified faces.
I’m a long way from my desk in Melbourne.
And I’m still loving it.
Perversely, most women want their children to be malnourished so they can get the food ration. It’s an understandable but tragic worldview. Siradji and I pantomime joyful celebration every time a healthy baby passes through our setup. However most are not healthy. The moderately malnourished get their name written on a register to come back next week for a ration, while the severely malnourished get a pink card and are sent round to collect their food. I pass the cards to the mothers with a smile and a thank-you, and their reactions differ. Some nod politely. Others withdraw shyly. My favourites are the ones who collapse into giggles and wriggle away.
After a while we learn things aren’t quite right. Women, seeing the white guy sitting on the chair taking notes, overestimate my station and think their kids will have have a better chance of being admitted to the program if I’m the one doing the assessing- so even those who have already been screened and overlooked are coming back around for another go. It’s time for me to move on, which is just as well because the journos have shot all they need to shoot, and I’ve collected all the data I need.
Mike and Cam have, however, found some women who walked here thirty kilometres this morning. It’s a triumph of perseverance and maternal care (assisted by the tantilizing promise of food), and we all agree that compared to these women, who have walked the better part of a marathon one-way since 3am, with little water and carrying sick children, we’re all lightweights. Mike and Cam, both athletic types, are in genuine awe of these skinny, resilient villagers.
We give them a ride back to their village with their children. The journos go to interview one of them, to get a feel for life in a typical Nigerien village. Typical it is. To western eyes its hard to compute how people live in such a materially-poor environment. Yet there’s an admirable sense of self-reliance out here too. They are a long way from a main road, even longer from towns and services. There are few signs of modernity. Everything they have they make and grow from the ground.
We visit one woman’s dwelling. It is a tiny mud-brick room about three metres by two, with a metal door that can seperate the place from the outside world. It is hot outside, but brutally-so inside, and whites and Africans alike are quickly sweating in the cramped quarters. Sunlight burns in the doorframe, casting the outside world into a curious white overglow.
In the room is a single bed which takes up half the floorspace. There is a mosquito net hanging from the ceiling. This is the woman’s indoor living space. She has five kids, all under the age of twelve, and she can’t age them except to tell us that they came at roughly two-year intervals. She is one of two wives married to the same man, and her co-wife has a mirror dwelling attached to this one, where they share the compound. They seem to get on well. This wife also have five children, and Adriane the project manager, and American who is fluent in Hausa, explains the local proverb that when it comes to children they are like a horse’s ears- always in competition, but never getting ahead of the other. Women in Niger give birth to an average of more than seven children each, so between them there are still four more waiting to be born if the odds play out.
We drive home at the end of the day, through late afternoon sunlight. Curfew for our teams is six pm, when we’re expected to be off the roads and back in Maradi. We muse on the day’s experiences. The Kiwis are struck by the gentleness and hospitality of the villagers we’d visited, as well as the difficult sight of so many seriously ill children. We settle into the dining room of the small hotel we’re staying in and work our way through several beers, and by nine o’clock were all pretty out of it. We’ve got two more days ahead of us in the field.
I’d nearly forgotten how much I enjoy this. I’ve been spending more and more time at desks lately. It’s the drawback of increasing professionalization. As you get older and more experienced, your skills are better put not to micromanaging a single site or overviewing a small project, but to working on ‘bigger’ issues. That’s not to give myself more importance than the guys on the ground. In fact, quite the contrary, I am deeply envious of the work they get to do- at least in the short-term. It’s just that my role has changed.
The enjoyment is a funny thing. It’s more a rejoicing in the intensity of experience, the uniqueness of it and how it differs from my usual grind. Many of the things we witness are hard realities. The program focuses on children on the cusp of death, in many cases, and when errors are made- even seemingly innocuous ones- some will in fact die. We are witnessing people who live in physical circumstances that we are inclined to call ‘suffering’- although, and not to patronize nor to belittle their reality, most have learned to take in their stride and accept with a startling grace. But overall, I come away from a day like today feeling infinitely more satisfaction than any day in the office. I wish I could have many more like it.
At least there’s tomorrow.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Location:Maradi, Niger
When you say the word Fiji, the sort of thing that comes to mind is generally some variation on this:
(In fact, the variation is probably a little more attractive than this particular beach, which is artificially created- and raked- on the edge of what would once have been mangrove swamps around the heavily developed Denarau Island)
Fiji, like many places that are high on the tourist agenda, is actually a bit of a melting pot. It has rich bits and poor bits, pretty bits and ugly bits, and all kind of swirly dichotomies in the mix. Its population, for example, is a blend of Melanesian, Polynesian, and Indian (or Indo-Fijian). (The Indians were brought in as labourers to harvest the sugar cane crop, and stayed to set up businesses; they now make up slightly less than 50% of the population and were apparently an absolute majority before the coup).
Oh yeah, that’s the other thing about Fiji. It’s kind of under a form of Military Dictatorship Lite.
I’m faecetious about the thing only because when you compare Fiji’s to other coup-prone countries like recent bloodbath in Guinea, or the cuddly chaps who run Chad, Frankie (Bainimarama- who heads up Fiji’s junta) comes across as all kinds of benevolent. Of course, for political opponents on the little archipelagic state (and for the Powers That Be in the Commonwealth, who have suspended Fiji, putting it into the same category of nations as Zimbabwe- God Bless Bob) this isn’t much of a laughing matter.
Digression.
At any rate, behind the touristy facade of Hiltons, Westins, Sheratons and Holiday Inns (or is that Holidays Inn?), there is a real country with real socio-economic disparity. Again, compared to the levels of poverty and physical deprivation you find in Sub-Saharan Africa, it’s hard to get too excited about the situation in the Pacific (as I discovered during my time in PNG). Fiji really isn’t all that poor by comparison, especially with the huge annual influx of tourist dollars. None the less, there’s a more impoverished side that most visitors don’t visit.
I was in Fiji for work (yeah, I have a crappy job, eh?), which I’ll probably tell you more about on a later post sometime in early August for reasons which will become clear then. Part of that work involved checking out some of the local communities, and while it was interesting to take a wander round and see bits of Fiji I’ve missed before, I did, obviously, take the opportunity to do some clicking. Just for a change.
This little series of shots I took at a village at the very end of the day, as the sun was going down behind the trees. As such a few of my photos were a little blurry as I was shooting in moderately (though not extremely) low light. As we came out of the village meeting house, there were lots of kids playing on the green, and when they saw the camera, they got very excited.
I took this first shot moments after bringing the camera up. These little tykes over in the distance (I’m shooting on my 85mm stopped all the way down to f/1.8 here) took one look at me and dashed together into a huddle, grinning cheekily despite being 20m away from me. I loved the effect- the kids in focus and the rest of the frame blurred out from the shallow depth of field- and the free-form mob they created.
(Click on the image to see the full-size pic, which will let you enjoy it a lot more)
After that I had kids rushing at me and it was a scramble to keep them off the lens. The 85mm was useless for snapping group photos at close range, and at first as I backed up, they kept following me. However I did manage to get this one shot which I really loved. The framing is ‘imperfect’ in that I’ve lopped off the head of one lad, and a second is out of focus with the shallow depth-of-field. However I love the expression on the face of the taller boy, and the sharpness of that image, and somehow the balance of the composition with the three heads just works. Well, I like it anyway.
I managed a couple of group shots after that. They’re a hit-and-miss sort of photo in that they can be boring, and they’re often less intimate than portraits of one or two people (see above), and the chances of getting all members looking at the camera are pretty much nil- especially with kids. In this case the children all insisted on making hand-gestures at the camera, the value of which I’m not sure about, but they clearly meant something because from the largest to the smallest they seemed intent on doing so. But these two shots I liked. The first was taken on the 85mm, and the second on my 16mm (which on the full-frame Canon EOS 5D gives an enourmous wide angle).
A brief comparison of the two shots also tells you a little about the difference between telephoto and wide-angle. While the children in both images are taking up about the same amount of the frame, you can see how the telephoto has sucked right in to (and blurred) the background, while the wide-angle has embraced a huge chunk of the village behind it.
Also, I love the waving hands of the little tyke in blue.
I was only in Fiji for 2 days (it’s my 3rd trip there so I didn’t feel too hard-done by), but I’m heading back to Fiji at the end of this month and I’m hoping for stacks more shots. I will, predictably, keep you posted.
A follow-on post from the set of pictures I put up on Tuesday from a photoshoot with my housemate’s extremely adorable 7-month-old kitten, Kirk.
I’ll let the photos do the talking here (for a change…)
A few months back my housemate got a kitten. He’s a ragdoll and he’s called Kirk. Some of you enjoyed the photos I posted of him back then, when he was thirteen weeks old. He’s now about seven months old, and I figured it was high time to share some more photos.
Also, some people (I’m looking at you, @ShoesfromthHood) have been gently implying they would like to see more photos of Kirk teh Kitteh. So you can consider this my contribution to the #1millionkittens campaign.
I am expecting cupcakes.
And in all seriousness, he’s such a darn cute little thing to look at that I just couldn’t resist. So I went out and had a little play with Kirk in the garden yesterday afternoon. As a ragdoll he’s supposed to be an indoor cat, but he’s okay to play in the fenced back yard (as long as he doesn’t realise he can climb the gate).
Comments on the somewhat wild nature of our back garden are not required. I like to think of it as our very own Carbon Sink.
It was a long way from the easiest shoot I’ve ever done. I used my Canon EF 85mm f/1.8, one of my favourite lenses and which I adore shooting with, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere. It rocks my world when it comes to portraiture, and that crisp, shallow depth of field and huge aperture make it a joy to shoot with.
(A reminder to the non-photo-literate readers among you, ‘depth-of-field’ relates to the amount of the image, front to back (depth) either side of the point you are actually focusing on that is in focus. Shallow depth of field means that only a small amount of the photo either side of that point of focus is sharp, which is the technique which gives those pleasing-looking portraits where the subject’s face is nicely in focus but the background is all smooth and blurry).
The downside to shooting at such a shallow depth of field is that if you get your point of focus even slightly off, the bit of your photo that you want in focus, is no longer in focus. This is a challenge even at the best of times taking portraits. When you are dealing with a seven-month-old kitten which has an attention span of a fruit-fly on speed, this is a task not entirely different from trying to hit a sheet of paper with a dart, side-on, while riding a mechanical bull.
Using a variety of tricks, cajoling, and abuse (it’s a good thing Kirk’s too young to understand cuss-words) I did manage to get his attention enough times to get a handful of shots I was pretty pleased with, and which I feel capture both his beauty (he is one gorgeous-looking cat) and his cheeky, resilient and adventurous spirit.
I’ll post the second tranche of these photos on Thursday to keep the variety up. After all, I’d hate to overwhelm you with kitten cuteness.
Click some of the shots for a larger version…
Melbourne, February 2010.
Still in Tasmania. No need to get excited.
My housemate bought a kitten the other week. He’s a ragdoll, and he’s called Kirk. Some obscure reference to the Gilmore Girls which I refuse to give air-time to. He is none the less an extremely cute little bundle of fluff (even if he did soil the kitchen floor this evening). These photos were taken of Kirk at about 13 weeks. I’m not usually the cutesy, pink, hello-kitty, Anne-Geddes sort of photographer. However, Kirk’s general adorableness made it very hard to resist snapping away some portraits. And posting the results.
Thanks for indulging me.
