On the phone

Lady on the phone, Dublin, Ireland, 2009

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 …

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