We saw lots of images of Che Guevara in our walks around Havana. But my favorite was this one.
We had one day out of Havana during our week there. We headed to a beautiful community – Las Terrazas – about an hour west of Havana. After lunch, we stopped at Maria’s Coffee and I ordered a Cappuccino. It arrived with this image of Che cast in dark chocolate – a great after lunch drink!
Here’s another “window shot” – this time looking out my hotel room window at the street corner below.
On my last day in Havana, I woke up really early, finished packing for the trip home and then looked out my window at the street corner intersection below. Loved the light – and took this shot! I processed it as a square image to better focus on the car lights, etc.
Only thing I wish had been different is that the car had been one of the older classic cars seen almost all the time in Havana!
We took one excursion out of Havana – on Monday – to Las Terazzas. Coming back on the bus, I started shooting with my Nikon D600 out the window of the bus at interesting subjects passing by.
Here’s one of those shots – our bus was passing an “open air” bus off to our right. These kinds of shots are so random – I was lucky with this one – catching that small window in the center of the frame. I think it captures the countryside – as we headed back into the heart of Havana!
During our first full day in Havana, we visited the campus of the University of Havana. While exploring the hilltop campus location, I came across this student having a conference with what I assume is one of her professors. They were sitting near the end of a long hallway and the natural light was streaming in from the north – giving her face that special kind of diffused glow.
To complete the processing, I cropped the image significantly, using empty space as an offset in the darker area down the hallway on the left. I finished it using some Lab color tweaks in Photoshop along with a slight luminosity adjustment layer created using Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2 (see Doug Kaye’s technique for this).
I originally thought I’d process this as a monochrome image – but I loved the contrast between her reddish shirt and her teacher’s blue dress and wanted to maintain that look in the final image.
On our first morning in Havana (January 24, 2013), I headed out on Dawn Patrol (our leader’s term for departing the hotel at 6:15 AM sharp). We walked down to the harbor and then worked our way back. Along the way back, I snapped this image of a Havana street scene just waking up.
I processed this image using Doug Kaye’s Silver Efex Pro luminosity adjustment technique before bringing it into Lab color in Photoshop for some final adjustments.
On Friday, January 25, 2013, we visited the Taller Experimental de Gráfica de La Habana and watched several graphic artists working on their projects. This printmaker was just getting ready to pull a print as we arrived – and I was able to snap a sequence of shots that culminated in this one of him pulling the print off the press and holding it up for us to see. I decided to post-process it as a monochrome image – to focus the viewer’s eye on him and the print.
Here’s another image – of another print maker adjusting one of his images before pulling another print. The texture of this image is powerful – his look, the tattoos, the hair on his arms and the needle in his hand. It’s one of my favorite images from this particular day in Havana!
On our first morning in Havana on Thursday, January 24, 2013, we headed out on “Dawn Patrol” – leaving our hotel in a group at 6:15 AM.
We headed east toward Plaza Vieja – and then north to Plaza de Aramas and up to Castillo de la Real Fuerza.
We left the hotel in the dark – but I lingered behind the group and arrived just as the morning light was beginning to wash over Castillo de la Real Fuerza. I put the camera through the fence and captured this image.
Nikon D600, 24mm, 1/25 at f/3.5, ISO 800.
Last week on Sunday morning, a group of us visited the Museum of the Revolution in Havana.
Shortly after we got into the old Presidential Palace (now the museum), patriotic music began playing and we could hear marching soldiers.
I peeked out a second story window of the Palace and saw this honor guard, marching over to the eternal flame adjacent to the Granma Memorial.
I loved the shadows they cast! With Doug Kaye and others in Havana a week ago. More of my Cuba photos are here.
Nikon D600, 85mm, 1/1000 at f/8. ISO 400.
This was one of my last shots taken in Havana last Tuesday afternoon with Doug Kaye and others.
As I was walking back solo to the hotel following a dance rehearsal we observed, thi old green car rounded the corner into beautiful light. Captures a lot about cars and Havana! More of my Cuba photos are here.
On my recent people-to-people cultural exchange visit to Cuba, I shot almost 1,500 images during six days of out and about walking – almost all of it in Old and Central Havana.
In packing for this trip, I wanted to stay light – but I also didn’t want to miss any photo opportunities due to not having the “best” gear. I had three cameras with me: a Nikon D600 (over my shoulder), a Canon PowerShot S100 (in a case on my belt), and my iPhone 5 (in a pants pocket). Most of my images were taken with the Nikon, a few with the S100 – and a number of “location establishing” shots with my iPhone – taking advantage of it’s ability to capture GPS location data. For the Nikon, I had packed three lenses – the “kit” lens that came with the D600 – a 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5 zoom, an 85mm f/1.8 prime lens, and a light 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 zoom.
I decided not to take a tripod – I’m a pretty fickle tripod shooter anyway and figured opportunities for using a tripod in the heart of Havana might be limited.
On the first day, I carried two lenses along – one on the camera with the second in a pocket in my vest. I had brought along a small daypack but decided not to use it. Wish I hadn’t brought it – it stayed in my hotel room the whole time!
Each day, we were accompanied by a Cuban photographer – and I soon noticed how little gear they typically carried. The Cubans weren’t changing lenses – they were just shooting away with the lens on their camera. Nor were they carrying tripods.
After carrying two lenses and finding that I also rarely changed lenses, I mostly just went out with one lens on the Nikon – typically the 24-85mm zoom. That lens turned out to be near perfect for the street photography we were doing. The one time I made use of the 85mm prime lens was for shooting the show at the Tropicana. It was the ideal lens for that – having just enough reach and low light performance for that venue. I rarely used the 70-300mm zoom – should have also left it at home as it turned out but it’s a light enough lens to almost not matter.
For capturing street shots, I mostly left the Nikon in P mode – with auto ISO and auto focus enabled. The D600 does a great job at figuring things out – and I was mostly very happy with the images I got. A few times, focus was off – and I flipped it into a different focus mode to adjust. I also used aperture priority for a few shots where I really wanted more control over depth of field. But mostly I let the camera do its thing – and came away very happy with the results.
While the gear obviously matters, it turned out not worrying much about it was the best choice for me. Being in the moment, seeing such great opportunities in a venue like Havana, made capturing images such a delight!
I brought along an 11-inch MacBook Air – to use for offloading images from the SD cards each evening – as well as an external hard disk to backup the images from the Air – ending up with two copies of each original image. After offloading the SD cards, I would put them back in the camera and reformat them in the camera before going out each morning.
I enjoyed sitting in bed at night or early in the morning processing a few of my images on the Air using Lightroom and Photoshop CS6. We needed to select five of our favorite images for a group show the night before leaving Cuba – and that was easy given having the Air and Lightroom along.
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