We made it back from South Carolina earlier this week, and it seems all I’ve done was answer e-mails until about this point. You really can’t complain about e-mails as a photographer though. It seems that most contact I have with editors/publishers/other clients is initially through e-mail. It never ceases to amaze me the connectivity we all have to each other, any time of the day, simply through this method of communication, and I’m not even including Twitter, Facebook, and all the other ways of “coordinating” with others online.

However, I digress. This is a photography site for that matter! We’re interested in visual goodness here, and the more the better (at least that’s what I say to myself when I haven’t posted in a while)! So on with it…

Red Bull likes to say their product gives you “wings.” Photography does as well. Think about what holding a camera gives you. No, not the metaphorical boost of energy (although, why not?), but rather a way of giving your visual curiousness flight! I always experience this when traveling. Although my trip to South Carolina was not for business purposes, that does not discount an amount of photographic purpose I had while there! Given just a little time, a photographer can really dig in to his/her surroundings, and travel photographers know this all too well!

The photograph above is a take-away from Charleston that I particularly enjoy because how everything essentially came together and what it means to document not only a slice of time, but what that slice of time (and place for that matter) means to someone else. I have a big problem about not shooting enough buildings when traveling and concentrating more on the area locals. On the way to lunch, we noticed this fiddle player setting up for his noontime jam. Yes, fiddle. Believe me, the music he was playing, while not country, was definitely cut out for the fiddle, not the violin. After lunch, we made our way back, and he was still there, so, like any inquisitive guy with a camera in hand does, I made my way toward him.

Here’s the first part of the tip (It doesn’t hurt to ask): I like to shoot close up, trying to explain a person’s surroundings at a wide angle. I have to get close. He sees me coming, and I just verify that this is alright. I lock eyes with him, point at my camera, and mouth, “Is it alright?,” while I point at him. He nods, never misses a lick, and I post up right next to him. At 24mm, I’m trying to create a place where this musician resides at that point.

The second part of the tip (Find meaning): We’re on a sidewalk, and the fiddler’s there for a reason. People. The first couple of shots do exactly what I want in showing this man, his fiddle, and his part of the world. This is what you get:

But this leaves out a whole host of other components that create a visual replication of what it was really like to be there with him. Enter the people walking down the sidewalk. They don’t have to be in focus, they don’t even have to be facing the camera. That’s not important. What is important is the fact that they’re present, always, giving this fiddler purpose other than just wanting to play. But wait, what else? It just so happened that the last photograph I took of the fiddler with people walking by also included a little girl in tiny red cowgirl boots, holding her hands high in the air, as if dancing to the music (image top of post). That’s the cherry on top of the ice cream sundae! This aspect alone made it much, much more powerful than the static shot of the fiddler playing sans the pedestrians.

The third part of the tip (Don’t draw it out too long): I know how it is being a photographer in a tourist’s city. I also know that I didn’t need to just sit there and keep snapping away at this man as if he was a spectacle for my shooting liberty. He OK’d me photographing him graciously, and it was time for me to graciously exit and let him get back to what was important: performing without a guy with B&H Photo hanging around his shoulder. I came in to the mini-shoot with an idea, I got what I wanted, took a few shots from back a bit, and gave my thanks. You don’t have to make it a whole photoshoot. You can see the few shots I took below (more than a couple, but not many). I walked away from 20 seconds worth of pushing the shutter button with a nice image, and the fiddler was not annoyed! Success!

Thanks for stopping by! I have a few more images to share from South Carolina, but I’ll throw them at you later…back to the e-mails!