Doing a little “pro-bono” work is always a good thing. Yesterday I found myself traveling with a group of green medical students to a small village in the mountains of Dominica. Yes, I do have an odd life. The med students were heading there to do a diabetes screening event for the town. They set up blood pressure test stations and a host of other simple tests, but mostly they were there to help educate the villagers about diabetes. So I came along to photograph the event.
Before leaving for the event I decided to challenge myself a little. I have done this several times in the past an always with great results. I chose to bring just one lens, one camera and one 4 Gig CF card. Shooting in RAW+Jpeg mode meant that I would have room for about 300 images, which should be plenty.
The idea behind restricting myself to this setup is pretty clear. I wanted to work with the available light and struggle to find the good angles. It is a trick that always works.
The event was taking place inside a small school. They had set up blood pressure stations outside on the walkway and other testing stations inside the classrooms. The classrooms were your typical Dominica style open air rooms with giant open windows and little artificial lighting. So, the light just poured into the rooms, and although it wasn’t very bright (I had to shoot at ISO 400 or 800 most of the time) it was a great horizontal quality that only window light can provide.
The difficulty in shooting in a situation like this is making sure that you are facing your subject in the right direction so that not only is the light falling on them nicely, but you are also not blocking the light. I wasn’t able to reposition my subjects, so I had to move around quite a bit to find the right combination of good looking subject (the easy part) and nice light.
I have a few examples posted here that you can browse through if you click the picture at the top of this post. Notice the one of the man who is harshly backlit. I think this is a nice portrait even though it is traditionally not very well lit. For some reason, in this case the lighting is sort of moody and fitting to the subject. I also included a few wider shots of the classroom interior so you can see how the light was entering the room.
I really like this type of shooting. You have to think, and move around. You have to get close to your subjects and think about composition and lighting all at once. It is also the type of shooting where you are living out on the edge, meaning you are pushing the ISO to the upper limits, shooting at f/2.8 most of the time and trying not to dip down below 1.60th of a second. I have always done my best work in these situations, or worse. For some reason I just find this “zone” to be the type of situation I enjoy the best.
These were all shot with a Canon 20D, 17-35mm f/2.8 lens, and a 4 Gig San Disk CF card. To see the entire gallery click here.
