When I was in Sapa, Vietnam I went to have lunch at my Hmong friend Chu's house in Ta Van. After lunch, Chu and her mom spent some time working on weaving a belt. As they worked, I could see the photo I wanted but the lighting conditions were extremely tough and I wasn’t sure I could pull it off. I have an embarrassingly poor track record of turning vision into reality when it involves a high level of photographic trickiness. There wasn’t much light in the hut, thanks in part to the cloudy, rainy weather. But Chu’s mom sat facing the side yard and whenever she looked up her face caught the pale light streaming through the open doorway. I bumped the ISO to 3200, opened the aperture as far as it would go, and darkened the auto-exposure by two stops, but I was still stuck with a very slow shutter speed (1/25). There’s no way I would have been able to get this shot if I wasn’t in such a lucky situation – Chu’s mom was so used to my camera by then that she’d stopped paying attention to me and I was free to take as many shots as I needed to get it right.
