Little shop of horrors

Early morning on the outskirts of Pala, a bustling town in Kerala, South India. While cycling along a traffic-infested road, all of a sudden, I see a butcher’s shop that redefines the word ‘intriguing’. When I climb the little hill that separates the shop from the road, I seem to have stepped into a battlefield rather than a shop…

Warning: hitting the ‘more’ button below reveals a picture that is not for the faint-of-heart. In fact, you stand a high chance of instantly converting to vegetarianism if you do .

I take out my 10-24 mm wide-angle because I want to capture the foreground as well as the shop itself and I cannot back up any further. The downside of the wide angle’s increased perspective is that the people in the background will be relatively small. So I take out the SB-900 Speedlight to emphasize the butcher by lighting him selectively.

However, the whole counter is pretty much covered in blood and animal intestines. The butcher understands my agony and gives me some – relatively – clean plastic bags to put my SB-900 in (I normally carry around ziplock bags to protect the flash in case of rain, and they would have worked here too, to protect it from blood, but for some reason I did not have any). I stash the flash behind the metal kettle to the left, side-lighting our butcher by triggering the SB-900 with the built-in flash of the D90. I’m normally not a fan of harsh lighting, but in this case the picture called for it and there was no way I could have hidden an umbrella or other light modifier in this setting anyway. As an added bonus, the flash, which is somewhat lower than the subject, produces a spooky, Roswell alien-like shadow on the left wall and ceiling.