This morning I posted a few photos of wildlife from the
Kruger National Park in South Africa after going through some photos I had left
unpublished.
Among these were also photos from Cape Town. One photo has a
special place in my memories of that town – I was taking photos of folks on the
beach with a Minolta Autocord medium format TLR camera. The 80mm lens is fixed
so all photos had to be taken from a close proximity.
In order to not identify people, which is always a challenge
to a street photographer, decided to take contre-jour shots thus having the sun
behind the subject hence leaving their faces obscured. I took a few, but
nothing special. Then I saw this couple having lunch sitting on the grass near
the beach and from the side of my eye saw a lady selling hats. She was dressed
in traditional African clothing and wearing a straw hat advertising her
merchandise. I focused a meter or so
behind the lunching couple and waited. Sometimes one has to anticipate
scenarios based on the environment and hope that the one clicking chance he has
to capture the scene will be timed just right.
So, the hat lady passed exactly behind the couple as I expected.
And I thought I clicked just at the right moment.
When I developed the film, I saw a strange shadow above the
hat selling lady’s head. Intrigued, I decided to print that frame even though
there seemed nothing very special in the captured moment.
To my surprise, my timing for depressing the shutter had
been better than I anticipated. Obviously a pigeon flew over the scene at that
very moment and I did not notice it. Here is the cropped and enlarged
unanticipated inclusion to the otherwise well choreographed scene I had
organized:
Now this otherwise pedestrian photo had that je ne sais quoi that makes street
photography so unpredictable and sometimes because of that, delightful.
September 26, 2019
©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2019
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