Religion

Well, it's Sunday again in American Samoa. As you can imagine, church is a huge event in American Samoa, which is a great thing. But it also means that a lot of the beaches are closed for swimming and/or fishing. So you options become much more limited. But it could be worse, in Tonga, it was actually against the law to work on Sunday and to do a lot of the leisure activities. Now these folks take their religion to the extreme. I shot this photo in Leone, with the sun starting to go down. It is a beautiful statue, but sits behind a locked gate, which is a shame. I had to raise my camera above my head to shoot over the fence to get this shot. But I think it came out kind of good and is an appropriate post for a Sunday. In this case I just set my camera to aperture mode and used matrix metering. Some people were giving me funky looks so I wasn't sure it they were okay with me taking photos so didn't stay long. Normally I like to ask first but no one was around until I was ready to take the photo. Then it became a case of better to get the photo and ask for forgiveness later. Ironically, I have never had a problem with people letting me take photos except for one case. I had stopped to photograph a beautiful little church and actually asked and received permission from some teenagers that were there. I got the tripod set up and they left. While I was taking photos (from the outside of the church) two men walked up and wanted money for taking the photo of "their" church. They thought I would sell the photos and make a lot of money and wanted a share. You could smell alcohol on their breath so I just told them I was an amateur photographer trying to capture their beautiful church for myself. But I also told them I would delete the photos as I had no money to pay them. Pressed a couple of buttons on my camera (no, I didn't delete the photos) and told them the photos were deleted and made my way to the car with them following and made my getaway. It is hard to reason with drunk people.