However good your photographs, they will benefit from a change of pace. The best way to achieve this is to ensure your shoot has details and close-ups that bring a different focus to your work
Professional photographers whose work is destined for publication as picture stories learn one thing very quickly, which is to give the art director a varied choice of image framing and image scale. The same thing applies in the non-professional world of photography for pleasure.
When photographs are presented together, in sequence or side by side, the viewer’s eye wants changes of pace, otherwise a sequence of pictures, however good, can look boring. If you take most of your photographs at a ‘normal’ scale with both a middle ground and background and from a similar angle of view, they will lose impact if you show them together, such as in a slide show. Intersperse them with details, however, and you can liven up the visual experience. Above all, on the principle that less is more, detail can sometimes capture aspects of culture more aptly than can a wider view, and it does this by focusing the attention of both photographer and viewer more strongly.
Spotting details is simply a matter of getting used to having the smaller picture at the back of your mind. Subjects are all around you, and it is just a matter of looking at your surroundings at that particular scale – a cummuter’s hand gripped to a hanging strap, a puddle on a mountain pass. A memorable cover photograph by Don McCullin from El Salvador was simply two thumbs tied together behind a captured guerilla’s back.
Learn to switch your frame of view from wide-angle to close-up – and remember to look up and look down, as by no means all details are at the level of your eyes. Of course you can always look for detail afterwards, cropping in close on details of pictures that you have already taken, but it’s better to get it right from the start.
Chris Stowers/APA
Often, it's the ordinary that spells out the cultural difference; what we all take for granted but is in fact distinct from the way other people do it. Something as simple as a table setting can be quite eloquent – a South Indian vegetarian thali clearly intended to be eaten by hand (even more so, food served directly onto a banana leaf), or Chinese dim sum, or a Japanese bento, or a few empty tinnies beside a barbecue in Australia.
A sense of place
Just by picking on a small object, you can sum up the atmosphere of a location: old brass plates on a bank in the City of London, a cafe au lait in a French zinc bar, bird cages hanging in a park in Chinese communities, mint leaves left in a glass of tea in North Africa, a pack of metal boules on a seat bench on the Côte d’Azur, stirrups on a stable door in Argentina, fishing nets and lobster pots on a the quayside of a Brittany port.
Look also for the mundane, such as peeling posters on a wall, and for the ambiguous, such as almost any view in a mirror.
Shops and markets
Markets, particularly open-air ones, offer endless variety of detail for all kinds of product. It might be a stall selling cheap plastic toys in China, or stainless steel pots and pans in India, boxes of lavender on France’s Mediterranean coast, or freshly caught fish in the Caribbean.
Kevin Cummins/APA
This kind of shot, as the example of from the herbal medicine market on the previous page illustrates, usually work best when you close right in to exclude the surroundings. You can find patterns in trays of fruit and vegetables, images that are pure colour in an Indian spice market, or naturally composed still-lifes of freshly-caught fish with weighing scales, provided that your subject bleeds to the edges of the frame.
Most camera lenses will focus down to the necessary for subject areas that are typically less than half a metre across. Tight framing nearly always makes the difference.
Look especially for things that you don’t find at home. For example, the red powder made from turmeric and lime for sale in Indian markets for marking the forehead with a tilaka, or dried lotus flowers in Egypt.
Shop windows can provide a further feel for a foreign place, particularly clothes shops, including hat shops, where the local attire is for sale. Photographing through glass is never easy, but go with the flow – include your own reflection in the corner of image to show you were there. The shops themselves may have interesting details: lamps and tiling, display cabinets and shelves, perhaps stacked with colourful, graphic bolts of cloth.
| Using the Right Lens |
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Regular camera lenses are designed to work at normal shooting distances, and perform less well in close-up, which is why there is a limit to the nearest focus. Some lenses have a setting that allows you to focus closer, while compact cameras often have a simple “flower” icon that does the same thing. Magnification (expressed as 2X, 1.5X and so on) and reproduction ratio (expressed as 1:10, 2:1, etc.) are the usual ways of describing the degree of close-up imagery, and same-size (1X or 1:1) is the point at which close-up photography becomes photomacrography, or “macro”. If you are especially interested in these very close ranges, consider buying a dedicated macro lens, which will give its best image quality and sharpness very close. |
Vincent Ng/APA
Hands on
There are also details in people, and while you might think that pushing in close for a view of a body part would just be too embarrassing, hands are accessible and easy. If you have already got to the stage of being able to photograph someone at an activity, it is completely acceptable to focus on their hands at work.
This might be a local craftsman at work, or a fisherman mending a net, or even a market trader whom you ask to hold up some wares.
For some reason, hands are never considered personal and private in the way that a face is, or even feet. And hands can be revealing, of the person and of the culture, particularly if they are doing something. Sometimes the hand will have rings, or the wrist bangles and beads. It may be bedecked with jewellery, such as at an Indian wedding, or a Tibetan with coral and turquoise saddle rings, or a Middle Eastern woman with a henna pattern.
Natural subjects
Nature does not exist only in the wild. There are cobwebs in urban environments, caged birds and flowers on window ledges, feral cats, and domesticated dogs that are often peculiar to the country. Check the pet shop to see what else people keep in their homes.
Sylvaine Poitau/APA
One of the richest sources of detailed imagery is arts and crafts, which can provide the most graphic images. With them comes the man-made detailing of signage and architectural detail, images which can often stand alone.
When decorative details in architecture are at eye-level, shooting is simple: ideally approach them head-on so that you maximise the depth of field and, if they have pronounced verticals in the design, you also avoid keystoning. Use a fairly small aperture setting, also for good depth of field, as artistic details tend to look their best when everything is completely sharp and in focus.
Many architectural details, however, are well above eye-level, and for these, the reliable method is to step back and use your longest focal length len. The gamut of possibilities runs wide: Islamic tiles at the Alhambra or an Isfahan mosque, gargoyles and sculpted saints on a European cathedral, Art Nouveau details on a Brussels house of the period, pietra dura inlay work at the Taj Mahal, cast iron decorative railings in New Orleans, gilded lacquer door details at the entrance to a Bangkok temple. You could also consider collecting themes, slowly building up a diverse library during your travels. For instance, the symbolism of the eye, which is universal, warding off evil. It is used huge on the great stupa at Swayambhunath, as protection on a Balinese outrigged prahu, as part of a massive video display at a Tokyo intersection. The blue nazar of Turkey (Masti in Greece) predates Islam as an amulet, and the Hamsa, an eye in a hand, can be found across North Africa.
Festive detail
When you come across a special occasion, such as a festival, continue to look in detail. At an elephant festival in Jaipur, India, for example, the animals are elaborately painted and bedecked, but after photographing them all in procession with their mahouts, what about closing right in on an eye for an unusual and highly colourful detail that will cause a double-take in a viewer. And then you could add that to your “eye” collection.
Graphics
Calligraphy, sign writing and other man-made graphics are all redolent of place. Mis-spelled or nonsensical signs are often humorous. The language itself, especially if not written in Roman script, immediately conveys the part of the world you are in. Ideo-graphic characters as in Chinese and Japanese Kanji can be rewarding subjects, not just because of their pictorial quality but because they are deliberately treated with more visual variety than are most scripts.
In Arabic countries, where life forms are not supposed to be represented, calligraphy is a high art. Look for professional calligraphists applying their craft – in Egypt, too, where artists will spell your name on a papyrus reed using ancient hieroglyphics.
Posters and display advertising can also be rewarding: many Indian movie posters, justly famous, are hand-painted; west African barber shop signs with hand-drawn hairstyles; neon restaurant signs competing with each other in a narrow Shanghai street. As well as closing in on these, look for contrasts that they may make with passers-by: the blonde Western woman advertising shampoo in a country where everyone has dark hair.
Ariadne Van Zandbergen/APA
Abstraction
One further photographic possibility in close-up is to make abstract images by careful selection and cropping. Photographing detail already calls for a willingness to look at things with a different sense of scale from usual, and a step beyond this is to look within the detail for unusual or graphic compositions. Meaning and intelligibility are less important here than shape, pattern and colour, which you can find even in peeling paint or an old wall.