April 16th 2011- I had a good day today

It was one of those feel good day today, and I had a great time.

After spending hours last night burning back up DVDR’s because the HDD’s on the laptop and the Seagate external were filled to the max, all while the rain came down  outside -  yes it does rain here and yes I did get caught in it, but it was nice and refreshing, I was looking forward to the portrait session today (Saturday). I did some background study on flash techniques – learned something new about my own Canon flash, and realised that I would have to play it by ear and wait and see what would come of it all and decide on the day how to shoot people living and working on Moore Road. Raj K came around about 9am and after downloading some really good ebooks for him and me we headed out onto the street.

The task was simple – walk down the length of Moore road – retracing our steps from the other day and try and shoot portraits of people living and working on Moore Road. 

Raj K in action, a fine colleugue to have with you and a good shooter too

JohnC in action

taken by Raj K

Starting off Raj quickly learned to jump in and translate into Tamil, Hindi or Kannada for me as he explained to people what we are doing and about the exhibition. In most cases we got a “go ahead nod,” in some we didn’t, so we respected their rights and moved on to the next site. Many people we spoke to and shot have been working on the street here for more than 20 years.

An hour and a half later we were finished, exhausted as the sun had come out and was beating down on us mercilessly. 

anyone for chicken?

After downloading and editing I took an auto into MG road to find a friends cartoon exhibition. It was very interesting as there was also the wicketkeeper from the previous Indian world cup winning team of 1980 something, opening the show of caricatures of famous Indian cricketers and the Chennai Super Kings.

Lt Col Shankar  with famous indian cricketer

After that I sampled Commercial Street and what a nightmare that place can be – traffic snarled up, thousands of shoppers, pollution galore, touts and hagglers, beggar’s and shoppers all crowded into a maze of streets - prices varied by hundreds of rupees as I search for a day pack for my wife Kath so before I leave next week I will have to go back with the ace haggler - Vino John.

Commercial street

I was kinda happy with the portraits and spent some time working on them in CS4 to give them that semi monochromatic look rather than keeping them in full colour – who knows how they will finally appear in my exhibition.

While I was working on them, the building site next door burst into life as a team of day workers loaded concrete via a human chain into the foundations on the site. I just had to shoot them and later when I was distributing the prints of the portraits I had taken earlier in the day to the various people up and down Moore Road, I gave one to the two workers I had shot and now they all wanted me to shoot them again – more expense tomorrow getting many more prints done for them and others in the street. It’s fun and I am enjoying it.

Tomorrow I’m going to the fair – you know Ferris wheels, side shows etc, etc so it should be fun.