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Wandering The Streets of Copacabana
Afternoon bicycle rider, Copacabana, Bolivia
Fujifilm X-T3, Fujinon XF 8-16mm R LM WR, f2.8 @ 1/3000 second, ISO 160
I’m guessing all travel photographers wander the streets. Sure, you stand out like a sore thumb with a camera around your neck and a bag slung over your shoulders, but these days, everyone has a camera and the threat of being photographed is not so worrying.
Mind you, I found Bolivians generally did not like to be photographed. Of course this doesn’t apply to all Bolivians, but in my experience, I met fewer willing participants than in other countries I’ve visited. So the solution is to adapt and rather than search for a close portrait, think of other ways to depict the activity in the towns and cities you visit.
Copacabana on Lake Titicaca is the original Copacabana, so they tell me. It’s very much a tourist town, as much for the Bolivians as the international guests. So the locals are used to seeing photographers around and they’re pretty good at turning their backs when they think they are being photographed. My approach was to use a wide-angle lens and simply use the people as small punctuation marks in an urban landscape.
One of the best things you can learn as a photographer is portrait lighting, not only so you can take great portraits, but so you have a strong understanding of what different light qualities and directions can do for a subject, along with the positioning of the light, the camera and your subject. Of course, as a travel photographer we might not have any control over these things, but on the other hand, we can recognise them when we see them.
And this is how I found this location in Copacabana. I wasn’t necessarily waiting for a bike rider, a walker would do because I could see the sun would cast a long shadow across the road. I could also position myself so the sun was blocked by the building, reducing flare and creating more contrast. I slightly underexposed the image so as not to blow out the highlights.
Of course, the highlights were still very bright, but I could darken these down in post-production. Adding in a little colour saturation and opening up the shadows with the shadow and black sliders completed the basic rendition.
The choice of framing (a 1:2 rectangle) was simply to fit in a square photo book I was designing in my head as I travelled around Bolivia. This shape would fill a double page spread. As it turns out, the photo and many others featured only on a single page, but I did enjoy limiting the frame ratios to just 1:1 and 1:2 for the project. There are many ways you can introduce a sense of continuity in a portfolio when the actual photos themselves are quite different.
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