Up at 4:55am, a short time later saw me leaving home, grabbing a conveniently passing tuk tuk, and then arriving at Independence Square by 5:30am for a photo shoot rendezvous in time for when the sun would rise a few minutes after six.

The purpose of the shoot was helping to promote a 590km (470 mile) cycle ride that starts on Tuesday, itself raising awareness of the Sri Lankan 1333 toll free crisis support line helping to prevent suicide and promoting the importance of mental health; a subject very close to home within our family in the UK.

Rain overnight had abated in the small hours and it was lovely to be out in fresh air devoid of its usual heat and humidity, watching the occasional tuk tuk breaking the darkness and silence to putter past and a few very keen cyclists already performing a five minute training route, their brightly flashing LED headlight lights informing of their metronomic arrival.

When dawn arrived the clouds played ball, offering a perfect filter for the photography task to hand and restricting the rate at which the temperature climbed. By the time I was done just before 07:30am though it was back to the normal heat and humidity, my glasses steamed up and my polo shirt clinging to my back.  I’ve never before seen so many cyclists in Sri Lanka and it was lovely to enjoy conversation with some of them once the primary task was complete. 

Petty officialdom came close to spoiling the occasion but thankfully there were ways to circumvent it.  Smartphone users were happily snapping pics, but turn up with a serious bit of kit and suddenly security guards appear out of nowhere and start saying “No photo.  No photo.  Need permit.” – but there were no signs anywhere to this effect.

Thankfully this happened after completing the session on the steps with lions in the background and another with lions in the foreground that were the centrepiece of what I had planned, and most of the rest of the shoot didn’t involve pointing the camera other than at cyclists.  The image with the Lotus Tower in the background was however grabbed with haste and as well as resolving unintended motion blur required editing out half a security guard who was equally determined to stop me as I was to succeed; although he wasn’t interested because that would mean going against a simple instruction, it was a charity that would benefit and nothing commercial was involved.  

For the photographers: Canon R5 with EF-RF adapter and Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 IS III. Ride-by shots with soft fill-flash.  By coincidence I was piloting use of a WiFi connection to an FTP server on my smartphone that backed up each image in near real-time, so even if I had been asked to reformat the memory card nothing would have been lost; the setup worked a treat, even with the 40MB+ .cr3 files involved.

Steve