A new business trip in Africa. As usual with short notice, just in time for Visa application, flight tickets and hotel booking. Destination: Abidjan, the "economic capital" of Côte d'Ivoire. Duration of the journey: five days. Shooting conditions: through the car glass.
For the first four days all working time would be in the Hotel, starting from morning to late evening, while for the fifth day a survey to two electrical high voltage substations (Abobo and Riviera) was planned. Actually it was a quite comfortable plan, but surely not the best conditions for trying to collect some nice photos of the country.
Nevermind! The Olympus E-3 body and the 25mm pancake lens would not take too much space in my luggage and hopefully some shooting occasions would somehow arise. This I thought when I packed my luggage (think positive!).
In fact, the chance to take some pictures around arrived on the fifth day, during our survey to the HV substations.
Everyone knows how HV substations look like also knows that the best chance to take good photos is on the way from the hotel to the substation rather than within the substation itself.
However, taking photos through the car glass of a running pick-up in the African roads may affect the the results of your photographic expectations.
The positive thing was that despite the fact the region has tropical monsoon climate and we were exactly in the middle of the rainy season, that day was magically not raining, there was plenty of light and all the African colors were surrounding my eyes.
We know, taking pictures is always a continuous adaptation to the circumstances and this time was not an exception. Only one short stop to eat some very good Lebanese food at Manuela Restaurant, then for the rest of the time I was compressed in the rear side of our nice pick-up trying to justify the fact I took my camera so far. What? Yes, luckily I had window seat :-)
After a large amount of ugly compositions, missing subjects, unwanted objects in the frame, under- and over-exposures and unlikely focus, I could "save" some frames, which I proposed in this post.
Lesson Learned: Due to the movement of the car, a combination of high shutter speeds with reasonable apertures and ISO values, worked quite well. There is no a magic combination of numbers, however, in situation like that I would really recommend to look at the LCD screen after every frame in order to adjust Aperture/Speed/ISO as necessary. Shutter speeds above 1/400 seconds worked in my case good.
Looking in front and panning the subject also helped me in keeping focus.
As always, Be Happy!
Luca
