Lost In Translation

I spotted these ladies in yellow this afternoon and discreetly followed them until I found a suitable background for a picture. I eventually noted that they were heading towards some scaffolding that had bright yellow plastic protection balls hiding the scaffold joints and thought that this could make an interesting image. As they approached the scaffolding they made a sharp turn to their left and headed up an alleyway and I only got to fire one frame off.

Not wanting to let a good picture evade me I caught up with them. My intention was to use all of the persuasive powers I've learned during the past 30 years working as a press photographer and cajole them into giving me two minutes of their time in order that I could make an amusing picture. Unfortunately for me the ladies were German and spoke no English or Spanish. My own German vocabulary consists entirely of the words Bier, Riesling, Danke, Franz Beckenbauer and Zeitgeist and I defy any student of the German language to form a contextual sentence using only those verb free words.

In time honoured fashion I resorted to a rudimentary form of sign language which involved flapping my arms about wildly and in a vaguely directional fashion and additionally shaping my hands into an imaginary camera and putting them to my face to click an equally imaginary shutter. This in itself was senseless due to the fact that I had a very real camera hanging around my neck at the time.

The ladies just stared at me with what appeared to be a look of horror on their faces and then quite literally ran away as fast as they could, which of course was not very fast at all, and proceeded up the alleyway in what I assume was the direction of the nearest police station.

In the past 30 years I've had plenty of people run after me as I made a hasty getaway from a court snatch but never away from me!

The picture you see above is what you get. You win some you lose some.