Rural Photography Documentary: Traditional Romanian Folk

To promote rural tourism, in Romania, many photographers go from village to village to take pictures of local habits and activities, local activities and clothes, objects, houses. I’m one of those who like to shoot a Rural Photography Documentary quite often.
During the late summer of 2008, I choose to go in a wonderful village in the Apuseni Mountains on a specific day: the first day of the “Love Festival”, on the “Chicken Mountain Pick”.
I wanted to keep distance from people in order to capture instants of their live, not well prepared portraits. In order to do so, I used a tele-ob.: Tamron 70-300 mm.
Here I show you an old man playing a local musical instrument. He did a good pose, and the lighting was good too.

This is an instant portrait of on old lady covering her eyes from the burning sun. What I like about it is the genuine smile.

Children are dancing on local music. For this shot to be properly done, a shallow DOF is needed. Moreover, the other dancing partners from the blurry background are still making the picture congested, so the sepia tone is helping the viewer focus on the main subject.

Since it was the “love festival”, here’s a portrait of the girl who won the contest for “perfect marriage country girl”. The light of the setting sun is producing a strong contrast on her face features, but the image has a good balance to it. See the dark upper-left corner in correspondence with the light area down at the right side.

Here is how the houses looked like in the old times in this area of my Country. It’s really tricky to photograph dark interiors when you are facing the strong light coming from the windows in front of you. The key is to manually focus on the ground, then re-frame the picture.

On the same topic, I have some older photos to illustrate the Romanian traditions, especially the clothes and the old people’s wrinkled faces.

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Laura

I started photography as a hobby in 2005, during college. My passion slowly became a more important part of my life since 2008. Because of using a combination of my photographic knowledge, with those of internet marketing, I like to call myself a "photomarketer".