close your eyes and hope for the best

I paused by the woman with the super hero cat - it had a cape, therefore it’s a super hero.

It’s bizarrely coincidental that two of the photographers from this blog were in Cuba at the same time. Despite the repetition, I like the shot so much I’ll carry on with our tour of this often confusing land of faux-capitalist socialism.

In Cuba, a taxi driver earns more than a doctor as they have access to the tourist trade that plies them with “convertible” pesos worth roughly 25x the value of a regular Cuban peso. This is probably one of the reasons that a large number of Cuban taxi drivers and street vendors could use their doctorates to sew your leg back on if the taxi toppled over in the street.

The shot shown here was taken on a day trip to Havana (or Habana as it’s correctly spelled and pronounced in Cuba), and is no doubt a commonly photographed subject as these ladies spend their whole day trying to entice tourists into snapping their well laid out compositions for a convertible peso (basically a dollar).

I duly succumbed and took a few quick shots with my Lumix LX-1. I love this little camera - probably the best travel camera I’ve ever used, it’s small and simple but most importantly it has a native 16:9 sensor that allows you to capture beautiful panoramic images. I find it opens up a lot of creative doors for me when composing simple handheld shots.

I was a little dubious about jumping on a tour bus with 40 bright white, overweight, complaining sonsofbitches.

I will scamper like a horny rabbit to the camera store if Canon ever wakes up to the fact that this sensor ratio is the single biggest differentiator in the consumer market and one that needs serious consideration for the pro realm.

Anyway, back to Habana. I was in Cuba for a wedding and so I was doing the family and friends thing for the whole time, which included amongst others, a day tour to the Cuban capital. If you’ve ever read my other posts, you’ll spot a fairly common theme regarding my disdain for tourists. As such I was a little dubious about jumping on a tour bus with 40 bright-white, overweight, complaining sonsofbitches. But, like I said, it was a family thing so what the hell.

As we meandered through the colorful streets of this fascinating city, half listening to the historical monologue supplied by our tour guide (who incidentally was a super nice chap), I paused by the woman with the super hero cat - it had a cape, therefore it’s a super hero - and embarrassingly took my pesos worth of 2 quick shots.

I hate photographing people, really hate it. Give me 10 beers and a crowd and I’m the life and soul. Put me sober, on my own, in front of a complete stranger, and I turn into a useless sack of shit, unable to remember any of the fundamentals of photography much less how to get someone to pose in an attractive manner. I guess that’s why I mainly stick to wildlife, where I can play voyeur and wait for the magic to happen. Fortunately, this lady was the consummate professional and did more than an adequate job of balancing her gargantuan cigar between her weather beaten lips for the few seconds it took me to work the angles.

I did a little post work on this shot, mainly to remove the pale yellow from the walls and street. Making this monotone really helped bang the vibrant colors of the clothing and clapper-board door shutters. A slight vignette, some dodging and burning, and I was done.

I know you can always crop a 3:2 shot from a regular DSLR, but the ability to visualize in 16:9 really helped to get this one right. Come on Canon, wake up and smell the panoramic roses.

For the record, I’ll never go on a guided tour again. Ever. The best part of this particular one was when the guide led us into a large church, at which point some pompous tart informed my girlfriend that she should remove her hat. After flipping this uptight zealot the metaphorical bird with her eyes, we were outta there. Quickly scanning the piazza for something better to do, we found the perfect antidote.

As we sunk deep into the chairs outside the nearest bar, we needed only a few carefully crafted words to heal the drudgery of the tour:

Dos cerveza por favor, rapido, rapido
Psffft, aaaaaah.

© Oli Gardner

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 8:25 am and is filed under Oli Gardner. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.