The Impromptu Professional Shoot

“You have a really nice camera. Can you take photos for us?”

With those words from the organizer, I got roped into becoming an event photographer. With no flash, no good available light, and worst of all, no prior experience!

May 19th is a holiday in Turkey, both commemorating Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, and a day celebrating the youth. Every year, on the closest weekend to this day, the local Turkish community in the Boston area holds a small, fun parade & get-together in a park near MIT, hosted by an assembly of Turkish student associations in New England. My wife is Turkish, so she’d learned about it through the community, and this year, we went together for the first time.

For this day, I picked ORWO NC400, one of my favorite color negative stocks, shot at EI 200 and developed in C41 – I find the best results are achieved at 1 stop overexposure. Mainly because it picks up beautiful, vivid reds, and refreshing greens, plus it renders skin pretty neutrally. Perfect for a party in a springtime park full of people with red Turkish flags! The grain also has a nice texture to it, it feels like shooting vintage cinema. My lens choice was just a 35-70/3.4 Vario-Sonnar mounted on my Contax RX SLR, my default choice for when I don’t want to think about switching primes. Given how much action was going to happen, and being with my wife the whole time, I wanted to focus on just shooting.

As an artistic amateur who prefers places and abstract geometry, I don’t find myself that great with candid people shots. So, when during the parade, the organizer came up to me and asked me to take photos, it felt like quite the challenge. But hey, there can’t be any growth without challenge, right? That’s even why I had brought my camera there, to try to get better at photographing people. Despite a slight nervousness, it turned out to be really enjoyable, and I quite easily polished off my whole roll.

Everything was far from ideal; the noon sunlight was at its flattest, I was using an art stock, I had no flash, and so on. There are quite a few things I would have liked to change – mostly having a flash unit, and a proper tele/portrait lens, as well as a second roll of film so I could take multiple shots of a scene. Still much to learn! Yet all things considered, I think it came out alright; the customer was happy, so mission success. And most importantly, the event was a lot of fun. We paraded around with flags and music, danced the halay – a traditional dance of Turkey similar to the dabke – and even had a random person join us in the dance off the street, just because he happened to be wearing a red jersey that day.

So below, I wanted to share some of my favorite photos from that roll. Hopefully, these shots capture that fun and enthusiastic energy, as well as the strengths of both the very excellent Vario-Sonnar and ORWO NC400.

Thank you so much for reading, I hope you enjoyed this brief and amusing story.
Please find my Flickr here for more of my work.

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