shooting from the hip in the dark

I'm really not a very good photographer. However, I occasionally (if you look back through this blog, I've got a few good ones tucked in there).

I still think this blog is not rich enough in photos, so I'll make this a post with more photos and less words. You'll get to see me a few times, get a little sense of what I'm doing, and enjoy a few lucky shots I took that aren't particularly meaningful, but just nice.

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Here we are a village called Navio, one of the best performing in IDE's program. On Steven's farm, we're setting up a drip irrigation kit.

Steven and I are pounding the earth around the support legs for the kit's header bag. In the bottom of the picture you can see the main and lateral lines which send water to the plants.

At another site, Anna and I installed a small electric pump to lift water from a well. AC electric pumping is the most effective of any kind of pumping.

It was a real surprise to me that most people here didn't know that you could run a pump off electricity-- they only knew that it could run lights, radios, TVs and fridges. Another curious thing is that most people don't know the word "electricity", and usually say "light" and less commonly (more understandingly) "current".

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At the local mill, I catch this lucky shot:

Incredibly, I manage it again:

There has to be a name for this shot: the feint portrait, of someone unposed, watching the photographer and is unaware of being photographed.

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I once met a photographer who told me that photography is about controlling the amount and duration of light "falling on the film" by changing only three things: shutter, aperture and sensitivity. Since I can do none of the above, most of my photos from Ghana look the same, since it's so sunny all the time.

It's amazing what a little shade and shadow can do. It can turn the most commonplace scene into something more dramatic and interesting.

Finally, unlike most other geeky types, I don't really like using the word "fail", the classic lol-style being to attach it to some subject to denote a lack of success in that thing. However, when this showed up on my phone, it was too rare and funny not to take note of.