I knew when I got this shot that the odds were similar to purchasing a winning mega-million-dollar lottery ticket. There were so many random factors involved that aligned with the camera, lens, and settings choices that I made beforehand, all of which made it possible to take the shot and allow the entire image to be processed. Not to mention, the chances that I was able to photograph one of my favorite subjects (laborers), candidly, without even knowing what was there and without looking.

To recap, I was returning from shooting the residents of the Dhakurial railway colony in Kolkata, meandering back through the footpaths between homes, when I heard noises of laborers at work. I couldn’t see what was going on because there was a brick wall that I couldn’t see over. And because my camera was already in hand, switched on, and my preferred settings dialed in, I simply stood on my tippy toes and held the camera high over my head, and took a few blind shots at a focal length of 18mm (A7iii + Sigma 18mm 2.8).

I don’t remember if I managed to take a small burst, but the image I ended up with captured the perfect moment for me. There’s the strained expression on the man’s face, the lopsided stack of bricks on his head, and both his hands working independently to place the remaining two bricks on top while balancing the load. To top it off, those same bricks feature prominently in the foreground (wall) and background (in the distant building), with the nice gap between the bricks on the man’s head that allows us to see the distant bricks at the work site.

“Chance favors the prepared mind”, Pasteur famously said. For street photography, it might go something like this:

"Fortune smiles upon the ready lens."