Taken in the Bangrak district of Bangkok, my shot for this week’s photo challenge depicts the daily life of a local man selling lottery tickets. We saw lots of people selling these all around the city. I guess they just sit there all day and sell tickets, which must get boring pretty quickly! I never actually saw anybody buying one. His white mask really stood out for me so I decided to go for black and white.
Earlier in the week I’d made some pretty basic mistakes when trying some street photography for the first time. At the end of the day I had lots of blurry images and it was pretty frustrating. My problem was that the camera was selecting a low ISO automatically, which meant my shutter speed was around 1/60th of a second. Turns out this is way too slow for shooting on the move.
For this walk I bumped up the ISO manually so that I could get a faster shutter speed. This meant I could take non-blurry shots whilst walking without having to stop. Once I made this change it was much easier to get sharp images, and I had a much higher hit ratio while shooting from the hip. It was great fun!
Have you ever made a mistake that’s ruined a day of shooting? What did you do to fix it? Have you ever bought a lottery ticket in Bangkok?! I’d love to hear from you!
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Hi Ben, nice photo and description. I discovered the ISO problem as I’d set it to 100 for some of my long exposure shots and hadn’t changed it back. Fortunately I have an auto ISO option so when I shot in Aperture Priority mode it selects the correct ISO. 🙂
Thanks Jeff, it just goes to show that you always have to be on the ball! Unfortunately in aperture priority my camera was choosing to keep a slower shutter speed to maintain a lower ISO, when actually what I needed was the opposite. It’s a shame I can’t select a maximum shutter speed when in ap mode. That could be useful! Because I don’t ever want it to go slower than 1/250 when I’m shooting from the hip.
It is great if you can figure out what you’ve done wrong quickly and still have time to get the good shots, I stuffed a couple of days worth of photos in Munich and Sorrento when I forgot to adjust my ISO for outdoor, sunny weather. I had previously had it on a high setting for indoor, low light photographs and as a result there was quite a bit of noise in my outdoor shots. I guess I’ll just have to return to those places and take better shots next time 🙂
That sounds really frustrating, what a shame! It’s nice to know that it’s not just me making this kind of mistake though. As you say, it’s always great to have a good excuse to go back somewhere a second time! Especially if it’s to take more photos 🙂