A friendly local Santo Domingan man poses for a portrait on the street. © Keith Dunlop

SANTO DOMINGO, April 6 – One of my great pleasures as a traveling photojournalist are the transition travel days, especially when I find myself in a part of the world I have not visited before. It’s an opportunity to discover a new city on my own terms — walking the streets with a camera, interacting with the locals, getting a feel for the pulse of a place. I try to work within a very small segment of the community rather than trying to cover a lot of ground all at once. I look for an area of just a few blocks that offers a diversity of local activity, but that might also serve as a representation of the larger daily life of the region — and always outside the tourist zone.

I move rather slowly through the streets, stopping frequently at public gathering places, and I make it a point to try to interact directly with the locals by purchasing local food and drink. There’s nothing like sharing a beer with locals in a neighborhood bar to ease concerns about my intentions. Even though I have cameras clearly in hand, working in this way allows the locals who may be wary of snapshot-shooting tourists, to accept my presence. In short, I allow a city to come to me, and the result is usually a body of images that are much more authentic and true to the spirit of a place.

Traveling to Haiti for my second assignment covering the earthquake recovery with Dominican Republic based NGO MOSCTHA, I spent a transition travel day in the capital city of Santo Domingo. These are some of the images of that day.