My friend L.A. and I share very little in common, photographically. He likes large crowds, I hate people in my photos. I like nature and open spaces, he hates it. This makes photowalking with him very difficult; one of us is always annoyed
But one thing that neither of us chooses to focus on is portraits, so I suggested that we each take portraits of the other, as practice/getting out of comfort zone/etc. I chose the location, which was the Central Park Ramble, at a time when I knew there wouldn't be many people there (which of course annoyed him
). I loaded up the SRT102 with TMax 100, which I've always though would be great for portraiture but never tried it, and here's what happened.
Side note: Peter sent me something, can't remember whether it was an exhibit or a book, called "Photographing Blackness". I'll admit that the few portraits that I've done have been mostly of people with light skin, and when I got these results back (as you can see, LA is very dark), I realized that certain things are very different about photographing people with very skin, like the fact that backlighting is pretty much impossible, metering is a bit tricky if you're used to metering on the face (why I didn't realize that at the time is beyond me
), and midtoney backgrounds are kind of the best, at least out of the shots that I took. I think I need to do more portraits with him and test out these theories
Also, completely unrelated, I need to stop down quite a bit
I have a joke hashtag on Facebook called #onlymynoseinfocus, and embarrassingly that tag can be applied to way too many of these shots
(are the rules "only 6" or "at least 6"? I can remove the penultimate one if the former)
