Picture of the day: Negreni

Yesterday i went to this huge Flea-market in Negreni, Romania. Tens of thousands of people go to sell and buy old crap... i don't say old crap because i'm condescending, they actually sell pretty much useless stuff, pseudo-antiques. It's like one huge garage sale with everything from nazi germany pins to old medium format film cameras to big 19th century grandfather clocks and even some very old furniture - mostly in good shape and knick. But mostly you'll find stuff you would name crap: corky, funky, kitschy objects.

Cool items i've seen over the years: swords - lots and lots of swords, very cool army/hunting/cutting stuff knives, bunches of old cameras: from your typical Zenith and Smena russian easy-to-use cameras, to Zeiss Ikon medium format with bellows, and even huge field-cameras (in very bad knick of course, but still).

Yesterday i've seen a Zorki 4 camera with 50/2.8 lens selling for very cheap, i was so sorry i didn't have the money to buy it, i already have a zorki4, but this one had a better lens, and it was in awesome condition.

It's also a photographer's playground, i've seen (literally) hundreds of people with cameras - every 4th person was sporting a camera, every 10th was snapping with a SLR camera, and i've even seen 2 other 5Ds and a guy with a 28-300L on a 5D mark II.

The abundance of photographers is overwhelming, and it kinda makes the whole "capturing the moment/event/rural environment" not so fascinating. When you're taking a photo of something, and right beside you is another guy holding a camera and taking a picture of the same thing, it makes you just wanna leave your camera and go fishing or something.

I did get over this by going about everything like a serious urban photographer, snapping pics from the waist, it really feels good to take a picture by not even looking at the subject. I'll post some tomorrow hopefully. You should try this, but be advised, you will fail miserably if you don't know your camera's ergonomics and you can't do good guesswork about what focal length you should be at - composition is still important. You just have to "see" with your hands, not trough your viewfinder.

This picture wasn't taken like that, it's just a picture of the only bridge going into the market (about 8 feed wide, 80-90 feet across, made out of wood and supports small trucks and big vans filled with furniture).

Camera	Canon EOS 5D
Exposure	0.001 sec (1/1600)
Aperture	f/4.5
Focal Length	38 mm
ISO Speed	200
Exposure Bias	0 EV

Lens	EF28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 USM

More info about the fair will come in further posts.

Enjoy!