Carpe diem!

Grab de moment, freeze it, steal that image that only lasts for a second and disappears in the past. This is war reporters business, photojournalists, sport photogs, not mine for sure. Though, there are times when you are in the right place at the right moment and things just happen.

The following images are not new; I took them at the Maldives in November 2008 when we visited an atoll south of Male. I dropped the rod for a second, grabbed the Nikon and went to the bow, to shoot my friend Eugeni who was casting his large poppers.

Just to give you an idea of the action here to follow you will find a sequence of 4 images, while for me the real /carpe diem” image is the third one. Not only it perfectly froze the moment of the strike but also shows a good deal of body language and a precise moment of the action that speaks for itself.

Even though I spend a lot of time on a boat with the camera in my hand, I don’t have too many images like this. Carpe diem, that is!

Jig colors? Do you really care?

Lately, I have developed an idea about colours, shape and size of the jigs that is pretty close to the one a Neanderthal could have thought of. Yet, again and again, there are examples that keep me thinking that maybe, we should stop for a second and weight our established theories. Should we eventually put in rewind and get rid of some truths that maybe, are not so truthful?

During my latest trip to the Tropics, the Andamans to be precise, everybody spent a lot of time jigging. Different places, different species, depths and tides. Every one worked with his favourite jig, included myself, and I picked a few. The reason for every lure I choose was different, yet most of them were simple, rusted, or paintless pieces of lead with zero appeal whatsoever. My main goal was to test, once again, what would make the difference and what would not.

I thought about my crappy jigs as soulless particles of metal, puppets maybe, and that I was their Mangiafuoco, the puppeteer. Without me, they had no chance to come back to life and draw the attention of any kind of predator. I worked hard for the money, fishing was quite good on day one to three but after that the tide changed and the action slowed down big time. So it was the moment to show all the tricks and turn a dead situation into some lively action.

Well, it was a tough deal, those animals don’t like very much any kind of slow retrieve (apart from GTs), and hence keeping a faster pace kind of tired me down. Thus, my crippled jigs, with no eyes, no paint and no sex appeal made some serious damage, even when the other guys, with good looking stuff would see no action.

I sell lures, have an internet shop and stock many different kind of lures with several different colours. None of them catch MORE fish, not a single one is miraculous yet there’s a jig that will catch more fish that any other: is the one that we will drop most of the time and that suits our style better.

Bullfighting in Madrid

Last Sunday I received a wonderful invitation to see a “Rejoneo”, one special kind of bullfighting where the bullfighter rides a Spanish horse, especially trained for this kind of show. The place was nonetheless the “dome” of Spanish bullfighting, the famous arena of Las Ventas, in Madrid. Hermoso de Mendoza, Andy Cartagena and Sergio Domínguez completed the billboard against 6 bulls from Los Espartales. That’s enough for technical infos, I’m not a bullfighting major fan or expert and the main reason I went is because I love to see what they can do with the horses in front of the bull, something absolutely magic.

Fact is that I had THE seats. “Tendido 9”, front row. Nobody in front of me but the bullfighters and helpers ring, the fence and the arena. Obviously I took with me the entire pack of camera equipment: my old D80. 5 lenses, SD cards etc. First lens to be used a Nikkor 10.5 f2.8 Fisheye, just to get an idea of how the “Plaza de Toros” looks like

The zoom that worked the most has been the Nikkor 18-200, pretty efficient in terms of focal length and fast focus yet not fast enough neither too sharp, especially when worked constantly at f5.6. As the afternoon light got dimmer also the D80 showed its limitations with the high ISO I needed to use. Noise was showing pretty heavily in most of the images and together with my scarce experience in these kinds of photographic events, delivered many poor images, and many already swallowed by the recycle bin.

Among the major difficulties I had in the beginning was trying to compensate the exposure difference between the shaded areas and those where the sun was still heavily shining. Once it settled lower on the horizon I switched to manual and worked more or less with the same setting for the rest of the evening.
Eventually I found myself with a bunch of underexposed images, more noise then, while those I have tried to shoot at a lower shutter speed came out quite blurred… It’s the story of the dog biting its tail, and sure enough I couldn’t go any further than ISO 800.

Have played with different kind of focusing, shutter speed, metering and focus point, and when the 18-200 became too slow to capture the dimmer light of the evening I switched to the 60mm f2.8 trying to gain a couple stops. Unfortunately, because of the Murphy’s Law, the rest of the action happened almost entirely on the other side of the arena and couldn’t get many decent frames.

Anyway, let’s not find excuses, what was missing was a good photographer dealing with the situation: my complete lack of experiences in sports and fast action in general heavily shows in the results and the only thing I can think of now is to go back in the near future and try again. Thus, I doubt very much I will be able to do it again from such privileged position.

If I will have such chance I will try to put my hands on a good 70-200 f2.8 and a body that allows me to pump up the ISO with no fear. Is a very exciting show and there are many good opportunities for amazing photos.