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Phil Douglis | all galleries >> Galleries >> Gallery Ninety: 101 ways to interpret Bolivia > Car wash by hand, Sucre, Bolivia, 2014
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10-MAY-2014

Car wash by hand, Sucre, Bolivia, 2014

A group of enterprising boys regularly approach drivers parking their cars around Sucre’s Plaza 25 de Mayo, and promise them an inexpensive but thorough car wash upon their return. We noticed many takers. I photographed dozens of images of kids hurling water over these cars from plastic buckets, and this one produced the best combination of graceful water-pattern and determined facial response. This image speaks eloquently of the camera’s ability to stop time in mid flight, producing startling effects that the eye itself can never see, let alone remember.

FujiFilm X-M1
1/420s f/16.0 at 230.0mm iso800 full exif

other sizes: small medium large original auto
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Phil Douglis22-Jul-2014 21:53
Thanks, Vera and MGB, for sharing your thoughts on this image with us. I am glad you both enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed making it. I made this image on program mode. I was shooting from across the street, and used a telephoto zoom lens at its longest focal length: 345mm. I did check my previous images of this scene as I continued to shoot bucket after bucket of flying water. All of those images were showing a shutter speed of 1/420th of second, and a the aperture closed down to f/16. I was also using an "auto" ISO of 800, and was focusing and metering on the highlighted child's face with my spot-metering mode. All of these factors were working together to produce this image. The prime variation between my many images of this scene always remained the expression of the kid and the pattern of the water. This image was easily my most expressive of the series.
veraferia21-Jul-2014 10:47
Great time! Great candid!
Phil Douglis20-Jul-2014 23:45
Yes it did, Iris. Tim and I were photographing this child washing this car for at least 15 minutes. All of my other images of this scene showed the water as either too close to the bucket or too far from it. In this image, the "stretch" of the water, with its twin curls of thrust, worked perfectly. It was all a matter of timing -- evaluating how hard he was pushing that bucket forward, and estimating the instant I would chose to release my shutter. I did this over and over again with each bucketful of water, and this one worked best.
Iris Maybloom (irislm)19-Jul-2014 20:47
Everything came together in this image....a wonderful moment in time!
Phil Douglis13-Jul-2014 03:09
Thanks, Steve. Who would have thought that a picture of a kid throwing a bucket of water at a car could be substantive? Most of the images I took of him doing this were failures because his expression was not good or else the flow of water started too early or too late for an eloquent image. I must have photographed this scene a dozen times, and this was the only one that worked well.
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