The researcher warned us to take everything told us by the Doms and their assistants with a grain of salt. They said that, as part of the cremation ritual at the Manikarnika Ghat, the chief mourner would have a complete shave before the proceedings could start. This man was having his full beard shorn in the street immediately behind the ghat, on a small platform to the side of the street. He was pointed out to me as the chief mourner for an imminent cremation. In the style of Tony Blair, it was at least arguable that the information I received was correct.
I use a fully manual camera, no motor wind, just a manual shutter winder. I do have the habit of composing and then firing off a quick succession of shots for interesting scenes, just in case an elbow gets in the way, or someone has their eyes half shut, or there is someone in the scene looking at the camera. I remember seeing an old photo of a scene in Japan, in which the photographer had taken essentially the same picture twice but with a lag of a few seconds and from a slightly different angle, and had put them together in a Gif file as I have done here. I was interested in the way the background of that old photo moved in relation to the relatively static main subject, in a disjointed, disorientating way. The idea worked here, too, I felt.
Another satisfying aspect of putting together a Gif like this is that is solves, to some extent, the question of which photo in a close succession is the correct choice to print.
Both originally taken with a Voigtlander 35mm 1.2 nokton, scanned, coloured in PS.
Here’s another one, slightly different idea, this time taken in central Taiwan, with Nikkor 105 2.5. Keep your eye on the statue.
Above and below from 朝天宮 in central Taiwan.
[…] the banks of the Ganges. I remember the bicycle repairman poised before an impossible task. I saw a man delicately applying a tincture to his brow, a group of women witnessing a baby’s head being […]