The Photo

Something a little different from me…

Most of the photography I submit here on DA is landscape, but I really enjoy other types of photography, particularly travel photography and environmental portraiture, and generally when I go on a trip I shoot more photo-journalism style shots than I do straight landscape.
I put some of those shots in my website, but rarely submit them here. There are one or two shots like this in my gallery, like this one [link] but generally I seem to have got into the habit of only submitting landscape images here.

Anyway, after some of the comments I received on a few scraps I uploaded for a journal, I’ve decided to occasionally submit some non landscape stuff here…starting with this one.

I’m a huge fan of Sebastião Salgado and Charlie Waite, and they both have shots of local fishermen in Mali casting nets that I’ve always loved. So when I was in Brazil last December and I saw this fisherman out on the lagoon with a net I thought I’d have a go at getting a shot of it.

Technique

The first part of getting to this shot involved getting to the place where I shot it from….a sand bank in the middle of a lagoon. I was in a boat when I saw the fisherman, so we had to pull onto the sandbank and I walked a few hundred meters through the water to ask permission to shoot.
People tend to react differently to having their photograph taken in different places. Morocco was a really tough place to shoot because people would invariably say “no”, although occasionally people would agree for money.
In Brazil the people are so open and friendly and not a single person declined when I asked.

For this shot I introduced myself and the fishermen told me his name was Antonio. He waited while I composed and then threw the net. This is the middle shot of a series of three, the first with him pulling the net back, the last with the net hitting the water…but the image I wanted was this one…the net spreading open as he released it from his hand.

From a technical point of view the main problem I had was with the direction of shooting. Ideally, I’d have preferred to be on the other side of him so he’d have been better lit and I wouldn’t have been shooting into the sun. However, that would have meant including the bank of the lagoon behind me, which was really built up with villas and restaurants. It didn’t really fit with the “feel” of the image, so I had to shoot from this side.

I composed from low down as I wanted the net to fill the sky above me, and I used a wide angle to get plenty of sky in and give the shot a “bigger” feel.
For exposure I made sure that the shutter speed was fast enough to freeze the action…anything over 1/250 is usually enough.

I’ve also found that when you take photographs like this of people, they really enjoy seeing the result. Antonio gave a really big smile when he saw the shot and shook my hand, which really made my day

Post Processing

As I said, I was really influenced with this shot by the work of Salgado and Charlie Waite, who both work in black and white, so I always knew I wanted to convert this.
I redid the conversion recently using Silver Efex Pro [link] which is fantastic for b&w conversions, allowing really precise localized control over contrast.

Metadata
Taken on Lago Malambar, Tibau do Sul, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil
Nikon D80 | Sigma 10-20
1/350 secs| f8 | 10mm | ISO100

Workflow in Apple Aperture 2 and Silver Efex Pro. Title in PS