Behind the Picture - The Legend of Talakad

I shot this portrait a few years ago in the main temple in the town of Talakad. These kids were on a field trip with their teacher at the temple. While everyone was smiling when they saw me and my camera, he was the only one who wasn’t. That and the expression in his eyes is what drew me to make this photo. The contrast of his serious expression with his classmates smiling makes the photo more layered contextually and visually interesting, in my opinion.

When it comes to shooting portraits, I first notice which side the light is pleasing to my subject and then I move in close and shoot from the angle that makes the most sense, given the light and the mood of the picture that I’m going after. In this case, he’s lit from the side by natural light passing through the entrance of the temple. It was pretty dim inside otherwise, with minimal light passing through cracks on the wall illuminating the rest of the room just enough to get a decent exposure. My aperture was probably around f2.0 and I used exposure compensation to brighten up the shadows slightly. If you’re a beginner photographer, shooting the lens at a low aperture is what throws the background out of focus, giving a nice isolation to your subject from the background. My post process was just making it black and white in Lightroom and adjusting the contrast slightly. Often when converting to b&w in Lightroom, the image can feel flat and grey so I use Silver FX to create a b&w image that has better tonal separation. This wasn’t the case for this though as the tones that Lightroom gave me were rich enough.

Talakad is a small desert town on the outskirts of the Kaveri river, in South India. The legend goes that Queen Alamelamma cursed the town right before she jumped to her death than surrender to the Raja of the time. Her curse went something like “Let Talakad become sand, let it become a whirlpool, let the Mysore Rajas fail to beget heirs”. It is overwhelmingly believed that her curse worked as Talakad was once prosperous but now is a desert and Mysore Rajas have had problems begetting heirs for centuries. The look on this boy’s face suggests that he’s, perhaps, aware of the legend and the ground he stands on.

The Art of becoming Invisible - How to create layers in your photography without disturbing the scene

I’m often asked how I shoot from so close and able to get candid pictures without my subjects looking directly in the lens or acknowledging my presence. The answer is not clear-cut but it can definitely be found in the process. Let’s take a look at that.

Before I even identify what my frame will be, I identify a “scene”. Let’s take the picture above. I first noticed the man with the tattoo on his neck and wanted to take a picture of it. So I consciously made the decision to have the tattooed part of his neck as part of my frame. Let’s call this the “anchor” of the frame as everything else would be based around it. An anchor can be moving or stationary. If it’s moving as in this case (a tattoo on a man’s neck who has no idea what I’m up to) it makes it more difficult to create layers as you have to compose the frame and shoot in a second or less while everything is constantly changing.

So, after identifying what I want to compose the frame around, in this case the man’s tattoo, I look around me to see what else is interesting. In this case, I noticed the Autostand tag on the wall in the background. What remained, was the connective thread between foreground and background which came in the form of a passing rickshaw and a woman walking with a boy. The woman’s profile kind of resembled the man’s tattoo and the passing rickshaw tied with the Autostand tag in the background. Now I had all my elements identified and I had a second or less to shoot a clean composition that’s pleasing to the eye or this compilation of elements would be gone forever!

In order to shoot this fast, I have to use zone focusing as I mostly shoot with a manual lens and stopping to focus on every frame would be extremely counter productive. What this means is that I have to prefocus before I shoot and know exactly what distance is in focus from where I’m standing to where the last element of my frame is. All I have to do is put the camera to my eye and shoot.

As far as people noticing what I’m doing and looking in my lens, I try not to draw attention to myself by only bringing the camera to my eye when I’m ready to shoot. Memorizing where the frame of your focal length starts and ends is crucial to pulling this off. In this case it was 35mm. Also, you’re going to want to take multiple shots of a scene and in some shots, inevitably people will notice you and look at the lens. Try not to acknowledge them until after you’re done shooting the scene and usually they’ll stop paying attention to you and you can still get the shot you need. Put the camera down for a couple of seconds and avoid eye contact, instead look past them as this will give the impression that you’re shooting something else and allow your subjects to act naturally instead of posing for you or walking away. Lastly, don’t forget to smile and say thank you after you’re done. It goes a long way!