Photographing Portrait, Street & Still Life
Wednesday, April 11th, 2012
I guess there’s a lot to be said for being focused in your photography… picking a genre you feel comfortable with and honing your skills with the hard grind of 20,000 hours that may lead to mastery of your craft. Unfortunately, I’ve never been very good at that part.
OK I’ve been known to shoot a little street photography. It’s the dance of total strangers among the light and dark corners of our city streets. People selling things, buying things, drinking coffee and captured (even stolen) moments of intimacy in the right place at the right time. The trick is to be open to luck and to embrace it when the opportunity knocks.
More often than not I’ll be coming home with my hand on my forehead thinking about the missed shot. The one that got away.
Portrait is a little more scary. I really don’t do portrait that well and keep telling myself this is the year that I’ll start putting in 20,000 hours of hard graft and grind to master the craft of photographic portraiture. It’s difficult because you have to cross the human relationship barrier and actually get involved with human beings – moving from observation to description and hopefully onto a ‘response’, stealing Ricky Maynard’s line.
Having good gear, good technique, understanding light and the exposure triangle will only get you so far with portraiture; you have to mesh with other human beings. You have to be likeable and to like other human beings. There is a whole skill-set in portrait photography that comes well before you pick up a camera.
But I put that out there… I’d love to be better at portrait photography. I’d love to have the Diane Arbus way with people where they would feel comfortable inviting me into their homes and including me in their human experiences.
I also radically culled my social circle some years ago so good old friends with deep relationships over decades are pretty much right out of the picture. When I meet old friends we’re pretty much all on that wavelength – we were never good for each other. Times have changed. We’re older and wiser and too tired to look for trouble. But hey, those people would be absolutely fascinating to pursue for portraits. If only we were still friends, which we’re not.
What I do enjoy and often shoot are still life photographs of surprisingly mundane objects. A few bowls. A pot. The fascinating way light can be bounced and manipulated across various surfaces and textures within a simple composition. It’s more challenging than most people think… and even more fun if it happens to be a piece of original three dimensional artwork that I can attempt to extend.
Still life is about control. Still life is about construction of an image with the limitation being you have to breathe life into the lifeless. Almost the opposite of dealing with human beings.
