Person at Work: Building the Lightrail (1B)

My second round of assignments opens in downtown Jerusalem, where several teams of construction workers are busy in laying down the tracks of a new lightrail which will run across the city. It was a good opportunity to test my Canon 5D, 50mm/1.4. I asked permission to take some pictures and - quite surprisingly - I was welcomed to do so, even though I could not enter the actual working area. This limit necessarily kept me at a fair distance from the action, allowing comprehensive views of the whole scene but losing details. I started getting a good feeling of the 50mm lens, soon forgetting the need to look for the zoom. Also, I experimented the power of aperture 1.4, which I had never tested before. Many shots went wasted because overexposed or too blurred, given the extremely shallow depth of field which doesn't quite fit wide scenes. I tried to look for different visual solutions, like catching the workers in the gap between two buses or from behind the bar of a cafe, but probably I did not work enough with these scenes, which could have been further explored. Also, it seems that the workers themselves were not particularly engaged in their action, at that time. I think that what was happening before my eyes is pretty much reflected by the pictures, but none really stands out. In any case, at this stage I feel I must work to get more familiar with my equipment, and I think I will keep working a lot with this lens.