A small step forward, but these are not the portraits that I want to make.

These are not the portraits that I want to make. Not because I don‘t like taking them or that they are not rewarding. They are great fun and challenging and as always I am surprised at the great variety and depth to the people that are walking around me, that I pass every day, who are doing amazing things and have an interesting, sometimes even fascinating story to tell. These portraits are easy and quite straightforward, even formulaic.

I feel I need to start looking more at how to convey the person through the portrait, who they are and what they do. I also remembered how much I need to work on posing. Posing is my absolute weakest point and is something that I would love to develop more organically. Sure I have memorised a handful of moves that usually work out in a picture, but I want the posing instruction i give to link to the vibe that I am getting from the subject and reflect the scene and the story that I am trying to tell.

You can see all of this in this straight up portrait that I made yesterday of Kevin. The first random but intentional street portrait in a long while, it did take me half an hour or so to get started as I was scouting a location to wait for a stranger to walk by that would suit. This is often the way I like to begin. Associating a background with colours on clothing or hair etc. in this case it was the other way around.

Kevin is a hip-hop and rap artist from China and is only in Sydney for a couple weeks. He is spruiking a demo tape, and having a few meetings around town. I dont think this image tells any of that story. He was dressed in some garb that could have given the viewer a bit more information about his hip-hop culture, but I elected to go to my safety zone of head and shoulder portrait without thinking about this, focusing more on the background that I was trying to contrast with his blue glasses. The light is straight up ambient and I placed him in the shade under the awning of an automatic teller machine. I think I needed to see his get-up in the image and also a little more attitude. It could have been the language barrier. His English didn’t let us have a very in depth conversation.

Happy to have made a start and thrilled to be able to pull it apart here, and get my third post in three days in as well :-)