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Phil Douglis | all galleries >> Galleries >> Gallery Ninety: 101 ways to interpret Bolivia > On the march, Sucre, Bolivia, 2014
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19-MAY-2014

On the march, Sucre, Bolivia, 2014

I was having dinner in the center of Sucre when I hard a marching band playing the rousing American Civil War song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” To hear such music in the heart of historic Bolivia was remarkable in itself. I quickly left the restaurant, and found the street just outside of it filled with marching schoolboys as far as the eye could see. I did not take my prime camera to dinner with me, but I always carry a backup camera in an iPhone strapped to my belt. I quickly learned that the tiny lens on the iPhone was quite not up to stopping the nighttime movement of the marching mob of kids filling my screen. On the other hand, the iPhone camera's optical disadvantages encouraged me to make use of blurred motion to interpret the scene to tell the story. The iPhone camera shot this night scene at the slow shutter speed of one fifteenth of a second, causing most of the moving schoolboys to appear blurred. Yet some of them stopped moving at the moment I tripped the shutter, and thereby appear a bit sharper than the others.The interplay between clear and unclear subjects gives this image its interpretive power – a throbbing sense of movement. (I never did find out why they were marching through the city’s narrow streets. Nor did I ever learn why they chose to march to the beat of a song written in another country, about a war they most certainly know little or nothing about.)

Apple iPhone 4S
1/15s f/2.4 at 4.3mm iso800 full exif

other sizes: small medium large original auto
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