India

India - We have been to India twice, both primarily wildlife driven, but in the end it wasn’t the wildlife I was most interested in. A large, ancient and incredibly numerous collection of peoples with a fascinating and diverse religious and cultural history over millennia, it was the people who offered for me the most colorful and compelling subjects. From the big cities with road traffic which included bicycles, motorbikes, scooters, Tuk-tuks, cars, trucks, donkeys, camels and elephants for transportation and cows as sacred animals who could go wherever they pleased, where horns and lights replaced traffic lights, to small rural towns and villages, life most often took place in the streets. As our group moved from place to place along local roads, often at moderate or slow speeds, I soon learned that shooting from our vehicles with relatively high ISO’s, wide open apertures and fast shutter speeds allowed me to catch snippets of that life on the streets. Rarely did I have the opportunity to set up a photograph although sometimes by first looking out the front windshield I had an idea of what was coming up. Often the images were happenstance and until I got home and had the images up on my computer I didn’t necessarily know what I had. I also had many opportunities to shoot people, often candidly with a medium telephoto lens and often with their awareness and permission (sometimes reluctantly). While I don’t usually photograph people, in India everywhere I looked an image presented itself.