Here’s a some­what “street pho­to­graphy” style shot. I took it about two months ago, when I was spend­ing the bet­ter part of the day with Steffi and Sophie at Holles Street Mater­nity hos­pital in Dub­lin. One after­noon I went for a short walk to catch some fresh air, and thank­fully took my cam­era with me. That’s when I spot­ted this lady sit­ting there, on the phone.

I politely asked her if it was ok to take a photo and she said “yeah, why not”. So I had a quick think about how I wanted to take the photo and how to best cap­ture whatever it was that made me want to take the photo in the first place. My sub­sequent con­sid­er­a­tions included small aper­ture to get those sun “rays”; cen­ter weighted meter­ing on the fore­ground as to expose for the lady, not the (much brighter) sky behind her; manual mode so not to take any chances with the camera’s own auto­matic meter­ing; low cam­era pos­i­tion to get the shadow of the fence more prom­in­ent into the frame; one shot only as I didn’t want to bother her too much; etc.

So walk­ing over to where I wanted to shot from I did a quick test shot from the hip to double check proper set­ting of the expos­ure (insec­ure me) and then kneeled down to take the actual pic­ture. It was only then that her con­ver­sa­tion had turned into shout­ing — and from what I could her she was just dump­ing her boy friend …