Tapas Bar, Covered Market, Madrid

This guy was nervous. Nervous when he served us our drinks, nervous when I asked if I could take his picture, and very, very nervous when I produced my stonking old honker of a camera and pointed it at him. He was probably worried someone would ask him to remove his shirt.

Anyway, I enjoyed the feeling of his being lost in all the horizontals, and I'm beginning to actually like the rather bad way Portra handles mixed lighting.

-- Struan Gray (struan.gray@sljus.lu.se), September 15, 2000

Answers

I don't perceive the nervousness of this fellow to the extent you mention, but maybe a slight sense of surprise or aprehension that you were taking a shot of him. The colors are interesting, very real seeming, yet a bit weird at the same time. don't know what to think about the out of focus objects on the counter in the foreground. I may decide to like them for the aspect of depth. They're not exactly distracting. This photo looks like a few I've seen in Double Take magazine. I've been in similar situations taking shots, and your shot here gives me an idea. I might try something like this with a wider lens and with a much higher point of view.

-- Tony Rowlett (rowlett@alaska.net), September 16, 2000.

Thanks Tony. I still find it hard to seperate what I remember from taking a shot and the image itself. If you don't see enough nervousness I suppose I'll just *have* to go back to Madrid and try again. Bummer.

The out of focus bar clutter was somewhat forced on me by the light level, but it was one of those forced choices that I like to think I would have made anyway. The framing and viewpoint were careful: I wanted a sense of him being hemmed in on all sides while keeping his face as the obvious centre of interest.

The colours are funky. Portra seems to give very noticeable colour shifts in mixed lighting, but because the saturated colours don't block up, you still get lots of usable detail. The result can be fun. Here, the look is strengthened by my balancing the whole image to get his skin and shirt 'right', and I think it adds to the feeling of dislocation. A less stylised snap is shown below, balanced mid-way between the various light sources (on my monitor anyway):

-- Struan Gray (struan.gray@sljus.lu.se), September 19, 2000.