Stepping out of my comfort zone of landscapes and cityscapes, I was inspired to shoot this portrait. The kids we encountered in Zambia and Rwanda were great. They certainly make a memorable impression. They’re also fascinated by the camera. I’ve mentioned the boy who followed me around Gisenyi setting up and packing away my tripod for me. While we were canoeing the lower Zambezi we paid a visit to a local village. As the chief’s wife gave us a demonstration in how they make flour, I snapped a photo of her toiling away with a small portion of her mob of grandchildren in the background. Without realizing, I left the screen on as I let the camera hang to my side. Suddenly I noticed all the kids were jockeying for a view of my hip. So I knelt down to show them the picture. They responded by pointing while chanting “Aye Nappa” (I have no idea how to spell this and am a bit ashamed to say I don’t even know what language it is, maybe our African language buff, Soniko, can fill this detail in). Our guide, C.B., filled us in that they were saying, “that’s me!”
Kids wherever we went loved having their photos taken, normally in a pack with huge cheesy grins. Most of these were really just snap shots to show them. As we climbed this hill in Rwanda (in a truck this time) to get a better view of the twin lakes, Burera and Ruhondo, we came across loads of kids – we were in Rwanda during a school break. As usual, they ran after us along the road and posed for photos. Then, at this verge looking out over one of the lakes there were only a few kids around. I’d started concentrating on taking landscapes before acknowledging the kids as it tended to be impossible after that. I snapped a few photos of this view and noticed that the older boy in this photo was watching me very closely, with that exact expression on his face and the littler one always by his side. I took a few photos and then called him over and had the two of them press the shutter button to fire off my bracketed photos for me. Neither asked for a photograph, which was a bit different, so I asked to take a photo of them. I’m very happy I did. I feel like this kid has the eyes of a wise old man. Regretfully, I don’t remember his name. I’m hoping to track him down. Cameron exchanged e-mail addresses with a few kids further up the hill who I need to send a few photos. They all wanted to be photographed with Cameron, who seemed a bit of a giant in Rwanda. Maybe those kids can track these guys down.
My HDR technique is based on Trey Ratcliff’s website, Stuck in Customs, where he bemoans the fact that Nikons force him to take 5 exposures in order to bracket exposures from -2 to +2. He states that the light range in the majority of scenes can be captured in three exposures, -2,0,+2. For no real reason I started using 7 exposures and have wondered what I would ever tell anyone if they asked me why I take 7. Now I know. It may be possible to capture the light range of the majority of scenes in three exposures. However, I’m still new to this HDR stuff and as such I’m not tuned to recognize when I need to go wider. For this shot, as I was photographing people (which aren’t very still), I dropped my usual 7 exposures down to 3. As a result, the background of this photo was plagued with noise. I think this is the result of Photomatix having to adjust the exposure of the background as it was not captured in the three images taken. Also, the option to mask out the sky in the Photomatix result to replace it with a noise free version didn’t work because I was missing the correct exposure. It’s come out alright after using Noiseware Pro, which is a great Photoshop plugin for removing noise, but I’ve lost some detail as a result. So, as I’m still learning when to shoot which exposures, I’ll stick to my -3 to +3 just to make sure.
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