Exercise 42: Rain

It seems rather unfair to have two exercises about rain and none about other types of weather or climatic conditions, especially when living in a place like Dubai.  I considered myself fortunate to run into the first rain exercise at a time of year when Dubai actually sees dark clouds and wet streets, but now it's midsummer and it's nothing but heat and haze likely lasting until about October.

So for this exercise I had to take the creative route.  Given that our previous exercise was about symbols, what better thing to work with than symbols of rain.  And what is one of the most common?  The umbrella, of course, which in drier seasons is known as the parasol. Lots of them about here in UV drenched Dubai, so I set out to shoot a few.  The one big problem with this is that to shoot people using umbrellas in the summer, you have to be in places where they are used - outside, without shade, in 40+ weather.  I did this for two mornings, trying to capture women in what might be considered indentifiably Dubai locations (note the Metro - happy coincidence - and the construction barricades - something always being built here).  

What an exhausting exercise.  Most of the shots were crap and given how much time I spent just getting these I could see that getting something much better was going to take several more mornings. So, I went with the best I had rather than suffer additional heat exhaustion.  

What I like about this photo (in comparison with the others) is:

• being able to see the subject's face (but not looking into the camera)
• the angle of her limbs, the symmetry of the bags, the color scheme (red, violet and black)
• the body framed by the station behind and above, the sidewalk coming to a point behind her body
• the tension set up by the vehicles:  train traveling out, cars traveling in;  there is a pleasant Z pattern, with the station walkway moving to the right, the train back to the left, and then the cars returning to the right
• the sun slightly overhead and in front of camera producing a washed out sky and umbrella panel

I exposed on the station entrance in order not to have the image completely blown out, stepped down exposure one stop, and used a polarizing filter.  

I dressed up the photo with a little bit of graphic design, borrowing the logo and layout scheme of a local magazine.  One important ingredient in this exercise was working in the word rain to the cover copy.  I added the coupon circle in yellow to mimic the sun, and placed the main article title at the point where the movement of the image leads the eye:  the umbrella flowing into the extended arm and bent knee.  The text behind the subject was right justified to help keep the eye from moving back to the left.  

I used to do desktop publishing back in the 80's and used early versions of Pagemaker and Quark Express on the old Macs with monochrome screens smaller than iPads.  But it's been a while since I used a dedicated page layout program.  I used MS Word to construct this, which is fine except for output.  I had to use very low resolution screen capture. As a result of this experience I have found Scribus and plan to get to know how to use this for any such future projects. 

Following are a few outtakes from the last couple of days on the sidewalks.

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