Immerse yourself
Going full gonzo and immersing yourself in the environment will, more often than not, net you some deep and intense photographs
Moving in to find detail in a larger subject, as on the previous pages, is the most obvious way of getting closer for a photograph, but there are others. The great war photographer and founder of Magnum, Robert Capa, came up with a few terse comments, and one of the best known was, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough”. He was talking in the context of war photography, and meant get close to the action to convey the sense of danger and emotion in battle, but it’s a useful piece of advice in other, less threatening, situations. It works best when there’s human action, and for a sense of engagement there’s really nothing like closing the usual gap between photographer and people. If you want to get across the full energy of an active situation, achieving Capa’s ‘close enough’ means being within touching distance. That in turn calls for some technical precision, as we’ll see here.
The situation was a riverboat on the Irrawaddy River, Myanmar. The regular boat that still, in the absence of a road infrastructure, serves as the link between river towns up and down this large river. It was part of the shooting for a book I was doing on an ancient trade route, the Tea Horse Road. All the local agricultural produce moves this way, and in the absence of a pier or landing stage, the boat puts in sideways and planks are laid out across the mud. The fascination is that little has changed, apart from the boat itself, in centuries, and the stevedores, working stripped to the waist, carry their loads on their shoulders up a plank to the boat.
The smaller picture, taken from land with a medium telephoto, shows the setting, and it’s one way of shooting. Clear, pleasant, nice light and some foreground interest, but no more engaging than that. This is sweaty, hard, jostling work, and that for me was the focus.
So, moving inside, I switched to 28mm and basically got in everyone’s way… The backlight from here is good too, and because I’d lost the direct sunlight, the contrast was manageable while still giving me some edge lighting on the faces and bodies. The technical matters are important in physically close shooting. First, you need wide-angle, and while a really short focal length, like 14mm, gives a certain kind of distorted immersion, the more modest and traditional 28mm that I was using here holds the potential distortion at the edges.
The thick of it
Thrusting yourself into the thick of things means that figures at the left and right edges of the frame are going to suffer some stretch distortion, and that adds one extra but essential section of awareness that you need to exercise constantly. In other words, not only do you need to concentrate on the fine degrees of action and expression happening in the centre, and the overall pattern of shapes and tones, but also make sure that the edge distortion isn’t too weird. This generally means a lot of dancing around and bobbing and weaving. Then there’s the enhanced need
to compromise on the exposure triangle. The shutter speed has to be high enough; here I was down to 1/125 sec and shooting at the moments that I knew this shutter speed would hold. Depth of field has to be pretty good, if not perfect, and here a wide-angle helps naturally, and I shot at f/6.3. I could have gone deeper by choosing a higher ISO but I wanted to have the ability to use the picture as a full page in a large book without any noticeable noise, so I stuck to ISO250.
Finally, there’s the matter of framing and timing, both inextricably linked. I needed the moments when a stevedore was centre frame and arriving with a load, but surrounded by others. This was the most successful, with the three bodies working together, close but separated and making a kind if triangular structure. This was also the moment at which the man on the right turned to look at me, and normally this is what you don’t want, by traditional street shooting standards (well, it’s not a street, but it’s certainly street style). Yet sometimes, the connected gaze of a subject to the photographer works. It gives the viewer even more engagement, pulling them in to the sense of being present. And the light on his face and in his eyes definitely did work for me, so this was the shot that got published.
Yet sometimes, the connected gaze of a subject to the photographer works. It gives the viewer even more engagement, pulling them in to the sense of being present