The observer observing the observer

Over the past couple of days I kept running into a group of street photographers. It seemed to be a street photography workshop: all Europeans, shooting with Olympus and Fujifilm cameras, moving around as a tight group. Apparently, it is acceptable to shoot even from behind a pole.

In Cuba, as in most places closer to the equator, daylight is almost perfectly split in half: the sun is up from 6:00 in the morning until 6:00 in the evening, and the rest of the time it is dark. The sun here is extremely bright. Realistically, you can shoot from about 7:00 to 10:00 in the morning and from 3:30 to 5:30 in the afternoon, assuming it is not cloudy. During the rest of the day the shadows are not just deep — they are black, and people retreat to the shaded side of the streets, where everything looks grey and visually unappealing. Who would want to walk around in the heat for no reason?