From the Back of a Pickup

I had been in Argentina for a couple months by then and we were up in the northern part of the country. We were based out of a rural town and traveled during the day to even more rural towns. The people were always welcoming but, although I spoke Spanish fairly well, I had difficulty understanding their country accents.

On one specific visit, we drove to a town to hand out food and other necessities to its inhabitants. My job was simply to sit in the back of the truck, hand out the supplies and make sure no one took anything. Well it wasn't long before I became the focus of a group of young boys. I was blond, tall, crammed into the back of a truck. Plus, I had a digital camera in my hands, most likely a contraption these children had maybe seen a few times. Their lives were very different from mine. They were clad in hand-me-down clothes, owning maybe few extra sets at home, and the thought of going to a movie theater or a mall was incomprehensible to them.

So, without much else to occupy their attention, they stood at the back of the truck and willingly answered my unspoken request for them to become my photo subjects for a short while. In the end, I was able to take a few photos which they were then able to look at afterwards.

Whenever I look at this photo I think about how it would be easy to look down on them for having so little and being amused by something so simple, but I don't think that way. In the end, they did much more for me than I did for them. Sure, we gave them clothes and food, but I was able to come away humbled by the fact that they live with so little and still have the ability to laugh, while I possess so much and struggle to see the blessing around me.

Under Inspection, Argentina

Taking in the Moonlight

I love the mountains and being a long way away from civilization. So even though I was around a small town in July of 2005, it was just about as far from civilization I could get. I was standing outside a little school house in rural Salta, Argentina. There was a little electricity, but I think it amounted to powering 4 incandescent bulbs in the entire town, all of which resided in the tiny school house. So even though there was electricity, I don't remember there being an electric hum.

It was in this silence that I was looking out at the mountains with a full moon in the sky. Without a need for a flashlight, I walked around outside and took in a southern hemisphere sky, which contained stars I had never seen from my northern hemisphere home.

Staring at the sky, I set up my camera on a pocket-sized tripod. And after trying out a few different exposures and ISOs, I felt like I had the image I was looking for. After a few more moments of silence, I packed up my meager camera equipment and headed back inside to sleep on the tile, school floor. The image that follows is what came from my moonlight photography.

29 mm, f/4.0, 30 sec
The Argentine Night Sky, Salta, Argentina