Another day, another total Lockdown, another post.
First off I'd like to thank all you folk in photography lovers who have shown an interest in my last few posts from Lockdown. I'm grateful for your support and for the added bonus contribution to my creative juices fund from the upvotes i.e.my Lockdown cider fund. We're in for at least another week of total Lockdown here in Auckland but I'm grateful we are not in the 8th week and counting like Sydney. They are really hurting.
This post was to be about some really cool reflection images I caught while out on my daily sanity walk but it's not. Not really. Bear with me.
Downtown Auckland. These images are taken outside an upmarket department store. The digital images are a loop of gorgeous ladies with gorgeous makeup doing gorgeous things. I had to spend a bit of time working out the white balance, speed' and exposure to get both the digital images and the reflections right or close to. The images were dissolving and looping fast so it was a bit of a mission to capture them on the phone.
The background is a blacked out storefront display which makes for sharp clear reflections and the digital images break the image into 4 areas with lots going on. A confusing, colourful and busy image. The storefront is blacked out and bare so no-one tries to steal fancy stuff during Lockdown, Thanks for that upmarket store! Without the black backdrop there would be none of these images.
While I was mucking around and taking shots I heard a voice asking me if I had any change. I looked down and in the entrance to this grand store was a homeless man, sitting right next to the display. I had been so busy shooting I had not seen him.
As you can see in the street scene reflection there are no people on this usually bust main street. I waited for a bus or car to come by to add some movement and colour to the reflected scene.
Since the first Lockdown 18 months ago downtown has become a depressing place. With no tourists, no international students and people working from home it is full of empty stores and not much else. The homeless , who in normal times were basically invisible in the crowds, are now the only residents. With no people around during Lockdown ,they have no money coming in. And there are plenty of them.
I looked in my wallet and found a couple of coins ,which I gave to the homeless man with his meagre collection of belongings sitting beside him. .As I did so I realised this entrance was his home. And the gorgeous ladies doing gorgeous things right next to him represented a world he would never be part of. This was as close as he would get to ever entering this place, or sharing the world it represented.
In this series of images the format is the same but each image is a world unto itself. The gorgeous ladies change and they are doing different gorgeous things, and the background scenes change.
I really like the result and how I achieved it with some photography skills I didn't have a year ago.
As I left and walked down the street to the harbour I passed many more homeless and I had no more change to give-who carries coins nowadays?. I felt guilty as I made my way out of their world and back to mine. Lockdown imposes restrictions on individual freedom and after a while you can get frustrated and even resentful stuck in your bubble. No work, no going where and when you want to, no swimming pool ,no movies, no people visits and other first world problems .But the experience with the homeless man made me realise how fortunate I am -to have a home to go back to, family, friends ,legs to walk , a car , a laptop, a T.V., internet ,a phone...the list grew bigger and bigger as to what I have and what I should be grateful for, which the homeless in the same society have not.
I looked to the global picture and was grateful I nor anyone I knew was in Kabul or Haiti, or whatever other hellhole Man and Nature will throw up.
So what will I do about all this inequity and injustice? Honestly probably not a lot. I upped my donation to the two organisations I support that help the people way less fortunate than me in the world. I will carry more change when I walk downtown. I will eat even more often at the local cafe which is not for profit and funds support for the homeless. I won't be buying any of the products the gorgeous ladies were advertising and who am I to judge those who can afford to?
But after a while the effect of this experience downtown will wane and those first world problems will crowd back in other forms as Lockdown eases and we hit a more normal busy first world lifestyle.
Does this make me a bad or a good person? I guess you'd have to ask those people who know or have known me (not just my ex'es please)I just want to try to remember how to be a grateful person. Grateful for all the good that the world has to offer us as well as the bad.
Well I hope you enjoyed this post. For me it was the experience that came from taking the images that was the real bonus, not just the images-which I like a lot. It showed me how creating certain images can make you think about the world and our place in it, and how we live our lives.
Photography- I am grateful for this and for helping me get thru Lockdown once again.