I love color!

Most of Stone Town, Zanzibar, is white, gray and brown–very textured and beautiful–but yesterday, when I went photographing as I do every evening, I found one of the most colorful sites I’ve come across here.

After winding my way through the maze of Stone Town’s narrow roads and alleyways, I found a group of children playing near a green and yellow wall. I was so struck by their brightly colored clothing, their interactions with one another and by the wall that I decided to hang around for a while.

At first the children were very conscious of me–something all photographer’s struggle with–so I waited and waited until they got bored of my presence and resumed their play. While I love shooting portraits–and did end up doing a few of those–photojournalism in its true essence is about capturing the “moment”. Most of the time this takes a lot of patience as the various elements–light, composition, placement of the subjects and so on–rarely line up.

I really wanted to capture these children’s world, their moments of joy and seriousness, their payfulness and curiosity. I missed many wonderful moments but here are a few images I thought I’d share.

This images was taken early on during the shoot when the children were still very aware of me.

Some kind of face off was happening between these two girls although I don’t know what it was about. It seemed to resolve itself very quickly as you can see in the next photo.

I love this moment of complete spontaneous laughter!

A random guy walked down the street carrying this amazing fish. All eyes were on it.