What I Look For When Nothing Is Happening

Most of my walks with a camera are pretty slow. I'll spend two or three hours walking around Manila in the afternoon and honestly nothing big happens. People are just commuting or working. When I was starting out, I only wanted big action shots and I went home with an empty memory card a lot. Eventually I started looking at the buildings and the sun first instead of waiting around for people to do something interesting.

If a road is busy, I don't even look at the crowd right away. I look at the walls and the shadows first. A clean background with good light does half the job already. With my photo Compression Point, I actually noticed the white arch on the bridge first because of how it stood out against the packed buildings behind it. The background was already there, so I just stood in one spot for a few minutes and waited until one person sat down to give you a feel for how big the structure was.

Another headache with shooting in Manila is how much stuff is in the way. There are wires, tarpaulins, parked tricycles, and carts everywhere on the sidewalk, so shooting wide makes it hard to tell what the subject is. I started using gates and doorways to block some of that out, or sometimes those little mirrors that street vendors hang on their racks.

A gap in a gate or a small hand mirror blocks out the distractions around the edges. You end up looking straight at a person's face or a small habit. In Bayanan it was an older man fixing his hair behind a gate, and in Quezon City it was someone checking a pink mirror between racks of phone cases.

Most of my favorite frames came from walks where I almost put the camera away.

Normal errands are another thing I used to walk right past without thinking. I like to stay on one corner for a while and wait for ordinary work to line up in funny ways just from the camera angle.

In one shot, a person is crossing a bright street carrying a wrapped round tabletop that hides their upper body, so they look like a circle with legs. My other photo near San Sebastian Basilica shows a rider standing between motorbikes right where two faces on a billboard line up over his shoulders. Neither of those was planned or posed. Two unrelated things just overlapped for a second while I had my camera up.

Other times I'm not even looking at what someone is doing, just how a shadow falls across the ground or a wall late in the day.

I still look for those small details at loud events with a lot of people. We were out on the lake for the Pagoda fluvial parade in Muntinlupa last September, and boats were everywhere with people shouting all around us. The wide shots of the crowd weren't really working for me. Then I noticed a boatman standing barefoot on the bamboo outrigger right next to our boat. The afternoon sun hit a white cloth draped beside him and cast a shadow that looked just like a religious icon praying. A second later the boat moved on the water and the shape was gone.

You can usually find a quiet spot like that even in noisy places if you slow down a bit. I had that same feeling in Bayanan late one afternoon when I came across a man just resting his feet by the edge of the water.

That's why I rarely leave the house with a specific shot in mind anymore. Trying to hunt down a picture I already made up in my head almost always makes me miss what's actually happening on the street in front of me. I'd rather just walk around and see what the light is doing.