Marrakech in Black and White

I've just got back from a two day, three night trip to Marrakech in Morocco.  This place is a photographers paradise, with so much going on you don't know where to point your lens first.  So the best bet is to slow down, take your time and consider what you want to achieve.

 

Marrakech is so colourful and vibrant it is difficult to take it all in but after careful consideration I decided to try and capture this wonderful place with images that work in black and white.  By taking out the colour perhaps I could capture the essence of Marrakech from my short trip.

Traffic in Djemaa El Fna, Marrakech

The first visit was to Djemaa El Fna, the main market place in Marrakech that is the entrance the Souk.  In the square there are plenty of market stalls, snake charmers, orange juice sellers, monkeys, acrobats and much more.

Djemaa El Fna

The Souks are a maze of shops in narrow alley ways selling everything from leather goods, spices, olives, lamps, metal works and much, much more. 

In the Souk

The good thing about using the Fuji X100 professional compact is it doesn't attract a lot of attention, where as the Nikon D700 is quite intimidating.  I saw one person using a DSLR, who looked like a western tourist,  getting shouted at for taking a photograph of a group of locals without asking permission.  I did ask permission on a couple of occassions but most of the time I was taking images quietly without the subject being aware they were being photographed, which gave a more natural feel to the image.  If I was unsure I didn't take a picture and moved on, there was plenty more to shoot further into the Souk.

The Olive Seller

What these images can't portray is the smell and the sounds of the Souk, which were amazing. Everywhere you went you could hear the store owners calling out to passers by and the smell of the spices, the leather, the metal work and the food.  Craftsmen were working at the back of many of the shops, working at sewing machines, at small anvils and producing leather goods.  I have tried to capture the essence of the Souk in these small selection of images.

In the evening we headed to a traditional Moroccan restuarant with live music while we ate.  The Moroccans like dim lighting, usually candle lit, which makes photography extremely difficult. I could've used flash but this would've killed the atmosphere so I decided to crank up the ISO on the Fuji to 6400 and shoot with the aperture wide open at f2 to get the shots.  This was a real test of the X100s abilities and the results were pretty amazing.

This ended the first full day in Morocco and the following morning we were going out on a cross country quad bike safari which skirted the desert nearest Marrakech.  This will be the subject of my next blog.

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