Returning the next day around lunchtime, we found just Kumar, his friend and a couple of children in the village. The others had all gone out of the village to work or run errands. Therefore, we decided to ask Kumar to show us what he would usually do on a "work day". Unfortunately, some things got lost in translation and he ended up taking us for a ride in his tuk-tuk around the city centre of Galle.  After arriving in the centre of Galle, he said he wasn't going to sell incense today. We didn't think there would be much point anyway as there were hardly any tourists in the area due to the economic crisis that was occurring at the time in Sri Lanka. It was decided that we would buy them lunch and eat together back at their village, gypsy style. Kumar in his tuk-tuk Kumar suggested a good local restaurant that sold cheap curry and rice to take out. We paid 300 Sri Lankan rupees per packet of food which at the time was about 1 dollar. On the way back to the village the...

After spending a whole evening trying to organise a crew that we would enter the gypsy village with, we crashed on our bed. We didn't get much sleep that night because of the intermittent downpours. There was an anxiety about whether or not we would even be able to film the next day in these weather conditions. As we woke up in the morning, we could still hear the crashing of rain on the tin roof of our dorm room. There was nothing to do about the weather. Everything had been arranged. We had a great topic and a great opportunity and we were going to film come rain or shine. We came loaded with two cameras, a Sony A7 III DSLR and a Sony a6400 DSLR. We had a Sony Zeiss 35mm f/2.8 lens on the A7 and a E PZ 16-50mm F3.5-5.6 OSS on the a6400. We used the Rode Go 2 for the mics and we plugged them into the input mic of the A7. For capturing video we found this to be a very good set up but we could have improved on the audio which we will touch on a bit later in this blog series. Ek...

We were walking along the beach on the South Coast of Sri Lanka early in the morning. Our feet sinking deeply into the sand, or getting washed with the waves with every step. The shoreline was completely vacant. No one else but us could be seen on this beach. Or so we thought. In the distance we saw what looked like a small village on the peak of the beach. A village made from black bin bags and various plastic items. As we walked closer we saw a river that ran into the sea. There were women washing clothes there and laying them on the rocks to dry. There was smoke coming from a nearby fire where someone was cooking. Sounds of children crying and laughing. We had indeed stumbled upon a small community of people living in a makeshift village on the edge of a beach. An old man sat on one of the large rocks that enclosed the community. We wanted to know who these people were, what they were doing here, if this was a lifestyle choice or a style of life brought on by unfortunate events. But...