(Link to The Gazette article of last night’s protest)
I like the photo above.
It was a moment when protesters were crying out, “on reste pacifique!” as police prevented them from moving on St. Catherine street, the busy shop-filled downtown street that is often the target of vandalism during riots in Montreal. It has nice colour and one odd looking character.
Mostly, I like it because it’s sharp. And this following photo as well. It was sharp too!
It makes it look like I was doing many things on purpose. Like I was seeing colours, moments, using reflections and the backgrop of the city to make a picture.
Truthfully, I couldn’t see anything! Everything was wet. I was soaked. My impermeable raincoat proved to be quite permeable. I had two condom-like pastic cover over the cameras and I could barely see what buttons I was pressing.
It was impossibly dark most of the time. I tried piggy-backing lights that I saw from cars, or streetlights directly overhead yet there was still the other problem of focusing. Was it focusing? Did the AF snap onto something? Please say yes!
Once a photo was taken, I tried to check if they were real photos and not a Georges Seurat post-impressionist interpretation of a photo. Yep. Just what I thought: Out of focus, motion-blurred, with ridiculous noise, AND the lens was covered in water. Great use of pointillism.
(The above four photographs are garbage photos that I didn’t send)
For the photographer colleagues that were working that night also, this doesn’t need to be explained. Even though we walked for four hours with the protesters and SPVM police, nothing really happened. It was frustrating to be underwater, exhausted and not have a picture that you like.
Even the police were exhausted. There was one gentleman that was having trouble walking. I was trying to figure out what was wrong. How do you say ‘is your harness chafing your inner thigh” in French?
What he actually said was, “I can’t feel my leg.”
So after four hours (25km, I roughly calculated) of walking in the cold, miserable rain, not being able to work well and realizing that you just got a bunch of lemons for pictures. What do you do?
Well, it’s like they say: When life gives you lemons, you say fuck lemons.
And you try to get a couple of pictures of something.
