As I write these words, I’m sitting in a coffee bar with my travelling companion, Lynn Fraser in the photo and creative adventures company we jointly run called The Journey Beyond. The café is on Waterloo Street in the old part of Kolkata, India, and we’re reviewing photographs we’ve both taken on our most recent travels together, which initially took us to Dhaka in Bangladesh to workshop with the incredibly talented, internationally renowned GMB Akash. We’re looking at two pictures in particular that are intriguing because they were taken just moments apart from one another, from what you may initially consider the same angle.
Lynn’s been to fourteen countries in a decade with a camera, a lens, and a great deal of curiosity to make photo stories, and I find her genuine interest in cultures and people, photographically intoxicating. The Highlands are home, but Lynn's as comfortable in a busy souk or a back street in Asia as she is in the glorious lochs, glens and seascapes she is lucky to live so close to, and that ease shows through in her work. Drawn to different cultures, different faces, different ways of being human, Lynn’s photographs reflect that.
So we come to this picture we’re both deliberating over, and I’m thinking to myself, “Ah, you nailed that Lynn, and I was just that smidgen off,” and I’ll explain why.
Often, when you travel together with another photographer, you’re bound to make pictures that have drawn you both to a scene for a myriad of reasons, and this was one such moment.
It was 5pm-ish and we were in a part of Dhaka where rickshaw drivers go to rest and hang out, many seizing the opportunity to take a well-earned snooze. We happened across this chap, and it chimed loudly for us both, clearly. And so we set about the scene, both deciding without consultation that we would slow the shutter down to accentuate the movement around the sleeping driver. The world keeps moving as he decides to rest. My photograph is above, and Lynn’s alternative view is below.
Notwithstanding my punchy reds (Lynn’s is a fairer colour response), it’s fascinating to record the differences between our two photographs.
This picture (top) is made with a Fujifilm X100V at 35mm equivalent, and I’m reasonably close, handheld at 1/15, ISO1250, f/8. Handholding this camera, which has no image stabilisation at this shutter speed, with a reasonably steady hand is not particularly challenging. I positioned myself on a fairly similar plane to him, thinking it would feel quite intimate with my proximity, and waited for traffic or people to pass. Squeezing the shutter button, I captured my image, revealing a lot of ‘sky’, using that word as a catch-all phrase for background with height.
This photograph (below mine) is made with a Canon R5 with the RF24-70 f/2.8 at 52mm. Lynn chose to stand back from my viewpoint, leaning against a wall for support as she’d raised the camera to make this image. This gave her a further anchor, as the system is that much heavier than the Fuji. Lynn’s image is shot at f/13, 1/6, ISO100. The settings are wildly different from those I chose when making the photograph, and it works beautifully with the two walkers passing by the rickshaw, rather than with my low-lying, fast-moving traffic across the road. The camera being raised loses that ‘sky,’ in this case, the white building.
What we’re left with is far less distraction from that white behemoth across the way, characters that are easier to make out than the ghostly ‘whip’ of my vehicles and certainly more context in that you can see more of the rickshaw the driver is resting in. Your eyes go to the driver comfortably, and it feels, to me, a far more rounded environmental portrait.
Nobody picks up a camera and sees the world the same way as the person standing next to them, and that's not a flaw in the process, it's the whole point of it, and I believe there's something genuinely fascinating about deconstructing two images made from almost identical positions and asking why they feel like they came from completely different photographic conversations.
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