This week we're visiting one of the greatest photography cities in the world,
Havana
[inaudible].
In grade six I boarded an airplane for the first time ever.
It was a flight from Toronto, Canada to the Republic of Cuba. Before then,
I had really only seen the middle-class suburbs of Canada.
I just assumed that everyone else in the world lived the way we did internet,
cable TV, pizza on Friday nights. But as I would soon find out,
life is a lot different down here.
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as we got closer to our hotel in old Havana,
we realized pretty quickly that this place is unlike anything we've ever
experienced. Every scene is a photo and every element of that scene has a story.
Anna has just celebrated its 500th anniversary as a city,
so there's a lot of history here.
The drive into Havana from the airport is really amazing.
So many old cars and I'm kind of overwhelmed with the photographic opportunities
already in this city and we've only really been here for 20 minutes like this
and this and this. It's going to be a good trip
and
we're here at the Capitol building and it's,
I don't think I've seen anything like it before. It's pretty unique structure.
It's one meter taller,
one meter wider and want me to no longer in the U S Capitol building.
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it's pretty crazy that this building is the lead up to frame the Capitol
building and so much money invested.
Not a whole lot of money invested here in this building,
but it looks like you're putting it back together. So who knows?
People still live in it though, photographically.
One of the most interesting elements in Havana are all the buildings that appear
to be almost falling over. And strangely enough,
there are still inhabitants inside these buildings and the government will give
them another place to go. So you can go to a shelter,
but a lot of people don't really want to go to a shelter.
They want to continue to live in their home. Right now,
Havana is experiencing a huge housing deficit,
which means that even though the government will give you a house that they
don't have enough houses to give out yet because there's not enough tourism
dollars coming in to facilitate the build so photographically,
well these things are really interesting.
You do have to understand that there are still people living in these buildings
and they are legitimately terrified that every any day they're building could
just collapse it on itself or the stairwell could collapse or the ceiling could
collapse and it's, it's a pretty scary place to be in
[inaudible].
The 35 millimeter lens is my favorite street style lens for both photos and
videos.
So if I'm out here making any sort of film or just photography in general,
I'm always on the 35 and with these ed lenses easily should the mind open.
So everything today is going to be at 1.8 plus. I have a reason to stop down.
My approach so far is just what a graph.
Anything that I think is interesting to me that I haven't maybe seen before or
that I think might come together in some good way.
It's currently kind of just middle of the day,
so light's not doing anything too interesting and I'm just kind of getting a
bearing on what seems to be working here. And uh, it's a very,
very interesting city. There seems like every single street corner,
there's so much going on.
We're going to Chinatown in Havana,
but it might be the lowest density of Chinese individuals in a Chinatown
anywhere in the world. So if there was an award for that,
I have a feeling Havana it might, they might take it.
Another interesting fact about coming here as a foreigner is that you're
actually issued tourist currency.
So if convertible pesos rather than the actual currency of pesos that they use,
it's a closed currency. So you can't even legally leave the country with it.
So no currency has souvenirs and leaving Cuba. So he's,
he's a mobile, a vegetable delivery service instead of an ice cream guy.
It's just a dude with vegetables.
[inaudible].
It's crazy that in any other city in the world,
this would be the most prime and expensive real estate if you're on the coast.
But in Havana right now,
everything looks pretty much ready to be condemned with a couple of people still
living in here. It's pretty crazy.
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behind me is floor retail,
which is one the spots that Hemingway used to hang out when he came from key
West to Cuba. Right.
And I think got nighttime specifically the signs in the light up and it's gonna
to make for quite an amazing scene specifically from this angle right here.
So I'm excited to come back in a few hours to get that shot.
[inaudible]
they were doing the quintessential tourist activity here in Havana.
We would drive around in a car, could film vehicle. Actually,
as far as our purposes go, you can,
you can point the camera anywhere and you don't have windows,
you don't have any sort of obstructions.
I'm going to shoot some street photos at the side that it is all dictated by
wherever we go, which we don't know.
We're on a tour right up to her for a half hour.
[inaudible]
as we drive around,
I'm shooting on aperture priority and focus more on my oppositions and actually
finding the images
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now we have one last photo to make in Havana.
I'm not really sure how this photo became the official photo of Havana tourism,
but the four buildings behind me tend to end up in every single Google search
and every single brochure you'll ever see of Havana, Cuba.
And right now we're gonna photograph the same shot and I'm going to wait for an
older car that's nice and colorful to be perfectly positioned in rule of thirds
and the bottom corner there.
And taking the photo of 24 millimeters nice and wide because I am pretty much
shooting at 24 and I'm pretty close to my subject.
I'm gonna have to do a little bit in post production to make everything look a
little bit more square rather than me just aiming up at the buildings. Uh,
things tend to kind of disappear to infinity kind of this way.
And now all we do is wait for a car. Here's one
other thing to consider because it is almost 12 noon right now.
The sun is pretty high and there's a little bit of uneven lighting,
so I want to do my best to kind of isolate only the shadow areas,
including the car that's gonna drive by.
I want the car to be in the shade as well, so a few requests.
I guess for me photographically,
the one thing that I might be missing out a little bit on is the natural
saturation of the buildings. If the sun was perfectly on them,
the lighting would be a little bit more harsher. It'd be some weird shadows,
but you'd be getting a lot more color out of the building. There you have it.
The quintessential Havana shot
[inaudible]
coming here is that middle class kid from Canada taught me so much that could
never be learned in school. It taught me to appreciate what I had,
but it also gave me a starting point to learn more about people in the world
that my small town was not the center of the universe.
This time photography brought me here. Photography gives us a reason to explore.
To see old places, new places,
and everywhere in between to doll the edges of the media headlines and see the
truth for ourselves to tell stories and to make the world a smaller and more
understanding place.
Thank you so much for joining us here in Havana. If you've learned anything,
hopefully it is that you should come here and you should spend your money with
the citizens of Cuba.
Everyone is amazing and you can actually do something right now to help the
future of this country in the future of the people. So I come here,
incredible photographic opportunities really exceeded all expectations.
I felt myself safer here than a lot of places that I've been.
And even though it is a lot different than what you're used to at home and
there's a lot of people and there's a lot of chaos,
you feel completely safe and everyone kind of goes out of their way to let you
know that tourists are number one because they understand that you are the
number one person bringing money into the country.
So thank you for joining us here in Cuba,
and I hope that you enjoyed this episode.