Pattern shots and street portraits
Friends, enemies: Welcome back to Nat's Photos, a weekly letter from Nat with, and about, photos.
Simplify, simplify
My goals right now are
Simpler compositions
Increase my confidence taking portraits
Take better pictures of dogs
"Simpler compositions" often resolves to "take closer shots, with fewer elements in the image." Take that far enough and we start to get abstract patterns.
Sneaky portraits
Those two shots were both from a trip I took into the city this week, with just my iPhone. I've mentioned previously that one of the great things about the iPhone is that it's very subtle. Walking around holding it in front of me or at my side it's mostly unnoticeable, so I can get a lot of that voyeuristic type of street portrait that catches people lost in their own world.
Taking photos of people surreptitiously is definitely an improvement in portrait confidence but it's not where I want to be. Right now, I take sneaky photos of strangers because I'm afraid of asking them for their portrait, not primarily because I like the look. (Though I do, also, like the look.)
Photos for when you're sad
I spent several evenings this week looking through Tom Bianchi's Fire Island Pines, because I was having the kind of feeling that the book creates, and I wanted to feel more of it.
It's a thing that I'm coming to appreciate that photo books are really good at: Combining a time, and a place, and a point of view, and communicating something about their intersection that can't be expressed in words.
Stats, goals, next time
Took about 500 iPhone shots and some-as-yet-uncounted number of DSLR shots.
I did technically achieve last week's goals of "take a portrait of a friend" and "do a photoshoot and then offload and process the photos immediately," but I offloaded them to my iPad and I haven't synced up the Lightroom accounts between my laptop and iPad yet. No progress on that backup situation, either!
I also kiiind of meant to take a portrait of a non-Jesse friend, but didn't have an SD card in my camera on the outing that I meant to do that.
So, this week, we're going to restrain and specify our ambitions.
Sync my Lightroom account to my iPad
Ask for a portrait from someone other than Jesse
Write in
This week I've been portraits-portraits-portraits so if you have one you like -- either one you've taken yourself or one you've found out in the world -- send it in! Let me know if you want me to share it here -- I'd love to include some reader photos but I'll default to keeping anything you send me private.