In Focus: Bargain Found

The Joy Of Finding A Bargain At A Madrid Market

Background Story

This image was created during a stroll in sunny Madrid, Spain, in August 2019.

I used my home leave from my assignment to South Africa to spend a week in Madrid with my wife, prior to traveling on to The Hague, the Netherlands, for some time with my youngest daughter.

Madrid has an abundance of squares (plazas), shopping streets, small back alleys, and parks to explore. The weather was great that week and we enjoyed a couple of days strolling through the beautiful capital of Spain.

That particular day we visited several open-air street markets, where a large diversity of goods was being sold. Fruit, vegetables, meat, fish, musical instruments, potter, leatherware, shoes, t-shirts, artisan bread, cheese, handheld fans, bags, tools; you name it, they sold it. And fabrics of course.

A fabrics stall at a market is always interesting to observe. Often the merchandise is just laying on a table or on the ground, and prospective buyers are picking it up, holding it to the light, and showing it to each other to determine if it is the right quality, size, and color for whatever they are creating at home.

And always there is this hope to find a real bargain.

As you can imagine, this creates numerous situations to make a photo. And this was just the right one for me.

How It Was Made

Only a couple of weeks earlier I was fortunate to purchase a just CLA’d Leica M4 and a Summaron 35mm f/2.8 lens for a very reasonable price. And since my wife brought my Voigtländer VCII lightmeter from home, I was experimenting with the camera, lens, lightmeter combination.

As you will know by now, I love black and white images and I had my favorite film, Ilford Delta 400, loaded.

Why It Works

The subject matter of this image is right up my alley: the busyness of the market, people interacting with each other, and the play of light and shadows.

The main subject is formed by the two hugging women in the center of the frame.

The pile of fabric and the piece held up by the lady to the left create a nice diagonal, leading the viewer’s eye through the composition.

The small tree and its support to the right and the larger tree to the left frame the main subjects of the image, while at the same time creating sub-frames for other points of interest: see the walking man perfectly framed by the small tree and the wooden support? This was a nice bonus that I only discovered after getting the film back from the lab.

As always, the light plays a major factor in making this image work for me. The harsh sunlight to the left and right of the group of women, with the shadows on the street in the foreground and the dark leaves of the trees, provides an additional frame for the main subject.

All parts work together to create several frames around the center of the image, focusing the view towards the two women in the center.

How Can This Image Be Used

There are several ways to use an image like this in a commercial setting.

There might be a hotel nearby that can use this image to show their guests the area they are located at, and how close they are to classical Madrid markets.

And the City of Madrid could use it to show prospective visitors its relaxed but lively street life and market culture, ideally for tourists who want to experience the real Spanish.

Although countries and cities are opening up after what hopefully was the worst of the Covid-19 / Coronavirus impact it might be a while until we can strolling the markets of Madrid again. Until then, images like this one will remind us of the better times to come.

Behind The Scenes: One More Scoop

Ice Cream On A Busy Street In Madrid

I created this image in August 2019 during a trip to Madrid, Spain.

At the time, I was for a work assignment living in South Africa, while my family stayed in the US. My daughter decided to go to university in the Netherlands, and since my wife was going to help her settle in, we came up with a plan.

My wife and daughter would fly to Amsterdam via Madrid, and on her way back, my wife would stay a couple of nights in the Spanish capital. I was going to visit my daughter in the Netherlands and fly from Johannesburg via Madrid to Amsterdam. We arranged it in a way that my wife on her way back and I on my way in could have a couple of days together in Madrid.

This arrangement worked very well, and my wife and I had a great time in what I still consider as one of the greatest cities in the world. We lived in Madrid during another work assignment, and it was very nice to revisit all the well-known and lesser know spots in the city we remembered from then.

One of the main streets in Madrid is the Calle del Arenal, a pedestrian shopping area in the middle of the city. While walking the street, I turned around and snapped this image of a young couple sharing some ice cream as the main subject. Hence the title: One More Scoop.

I like how my eye first is drawn to the couple in the front, and then to the man in the white shirt in the middle of the image. And next to the movement of the other people in the street in the background. While I was, and still am, very pleased with how the image turned out, I also learned a lot from the critique I got after submitting this image for review to Lensculture:

We see a couple sharing a cup of ice cream. It's a nice, intimate moment that is worthy of a photograph. As a rule, our eyes are initially drawn to the brightest highlight in an image. This photograph is a bit confusing because I immediately identified the man in the center of the frame as the focal point. It's because of his placement, his white shirt, and the fact that he is fully in-focus. Consider using a shallow depth-of-field to help distinguish the focal point in your images.

This feedback refreshed my knowledge of how people first look at highlights in images; it also made me realize that I have memories that define the picture for me in a way other viewers don’t.

Since I remember that the first thing I saw was the couple with the ice cream (the man in the white shirt walked a bit later into the frame), I look at them first. Viewers who don't have that memory will look first at the man in the white shirt.

The Lensculture reviewer got confused by this image. However, I wonder if the confusion was not as much created by the image, as by its title. Would the reviewer have been less confused if I called it, e.g., 'man in white shirt shopping'?

Based on this feedback, I learned three critical things for my photography:

1. To be aware of highlights that can draw the viewer's attention from the main subject

2. To use depth of field to ensure the viewer knows what the intended main subject of the image is

3. To be intentional with image titles

4. To remember that I have memories regarding each image I created that other viewers will not have, which will affect what they and I see in an image.

In the end, I still like this image as a nice example of candid street photography, and I consciously decided not to change the title.

Let me know in the comments what you see, where is your eye drawn to first?