I went down to Lahore for a family event in early January. I was there for two days - most of it was taken up with meeting family and friends but as always I managed to take out a couple of hours to shoot the street. I went down to Wazir Khan Mosque, a beautiful mosque built in 1634 for a couple of hours and I will be putting up a separate post on that later this week. For this post in particular, I wanted to put up some of the images I got while driving through a night market in Lahore. I was able to stop and shoot for about 30 minutes - not a lot of time but I leveraged whatever time I had.
Shooting in Lahore is quite an experience. For one thing, I learnt that you have to be able to be able to anticipate and dodge motorbikes, rickshaws and cars. Something that is not easy to do if you are trying to focus on a scene that you want to capture, particularly in low light. Luckily I had my brother in law with me and he was designated the task of making sure that I survived the experience.
Given the chaos and cacophony, the frenetic pace of the market and the surrounding roads, I think I got a bit frenetic myself. Lots and lots of adrenalin flowing and the result was that a number of my images turned out to be a bit blurry. The light was challenging and difficult to assess. There were so many light bulbs, tube lights, etc that there were areas of extreme contrast, with lots of brightness in the lit up areas and completely dark in the shadows. I shot with the Fujifilm 100T and even though camera's meter went crazy, I thought the it performed valiantly in light of the crazed exposure settings and decisions made. Oh, I forgot to mention that I was also shooting handheld. Why? I think because I am lazy. The first step towards rehabilitation of any kind is admitting you have a problem. My problem these days is my tendency to forget to take my tripod out at night. I don't know why I am determined to try and work out a way to capture low light images on the fly.
I wish I could go back and shoot again. That market was amazing and I barely touched the tip. I strongly believe that one has to go back and revisit the "scene of the crime" repeatedly to really be able to capture the essence of that place or subject. You have to keep shooting until the people around you forget you are even there and that's when the magic starts to happen. I will go back again this year, if all goes well and hopefully this time I will be able to capture more of this wonderful city's essence.
In the meantime, here is the first cut:
