While on the Antonin Kratochvil workshop in Transylvania in May 2009, there were a lot of quick shots – meaning that there were these sudden chances that appeared on the horizont and which you could just jump on right that moment or forget about it alltogether. Due to my workshop focus (train travel) I am sure I missed quite a lot of interesting chances, but then again I managed to go to this one: a visit to THE historical horsemarket of the region, which apparently is the last remaining of it’s kind.
I am certainly not the most well informed person on horse markets, but hearing from our guide that this one was not only the last of it’s kind but also probably about to be closed down itself, did in fact surprise me. If you travel along Transylvania you just have to notice how important horses and horse carriages are as a means of transportation. Closing the old markets down did seem very odd to me. But from what I saw, it looked like it was run 100% by Roma – and sadly this might be one of the reasons for it’s disappearance.
As I was wandering around the little green valley between horse carts with sleeping children inside, families having picknick on the grass, horse inspections, young men showing off, young women showing off too (only differently) … It did not look so different from other village horsemarkets I had seen so far. People were dressed differently, of course, amongst other details, but people’s behaviour pattern was quite recognizable – the rituals were similar. There were a lot of pittoresque imagery – you certainly could take incredible amounts of pictures there – and the rest of my group was indeed doing just that … fingers step-dancing on the shutter-releases … But … but … Damn! I was irritated. So this were the last breaths of the last historical horse market? How the heck do I deal with this? We would be there for an hour or so … which I could use for the obvious or the less obvious. I wanted the less obvious. I just damn love to make life harder for me than it needs to be :-).
And so I went and did a little experiment. I was not sure if it would work at all – and I am positive one could still debate about that now.
The sun was so bright, I could not see a thing on the monitor of the unconspicuous point&shoot I was carrying with me. I made a self made pinhole-camera out of it and started to point everywhere to try to take pictures. It was difficult to get any result at all because that camera cannot be set on manual mode – and so it continuously tried to focus where it could not. I managed to sneak some images that day, before the annoyed autofocus ate up all the battery supply. If I had only known what I would be up to … I would have taken all batteries I had with me. But so I was taken by surprise … definitively a mistake that will not happen to me again.
But to be serious I would not have gotten so many more images even with additional batteries. It took me in average 4 minutes to trick out the autofocus and get one more or less decent picture, and part of the workshop people were already trying to leave. So I would maybe have gotten 6 or 7 additional images … I am happy enough with what I have managed to do, even if I could have done and achieved so much more with a better camera and more time. Because even if it was a “quick shot” of a kind, I managed to give the pictures the aura I intended to. I did not make pictures of the individuals on this market, but of something that is about to become history itself. So I am not really satisfied with the outcome, but happy nonetheless. I would probably have taken nicer pictures if I had concentrated on the more obvious, but I was absolutely glad I had chosen this little experiment.
My first pinhole camera pictures … Taken with a little automatic point&shoot from Nikon. :-) What not to love!?
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