Street Portraits and Me

I am not new to the street portrait project or street photograpy in general. A couple of years ago I made a start on a 100 strangers project over on the group with the same name on flickr. At the time it was one of the most nerve racking yet fruitful experiences I had ever been a part of. Those 18 portraits I took of strangers on the street led to some wonderful exchanges and gave me the confidence to step up and start fully fledged street photography. It led indirectly to paid work because when I would talk to people about the project they would invariably love the work and know someone who needed photos.

Over the last few months I have made some images and accompanying stories as I formulate what it is all going to look like. I have played around with the style of the genre and the captions, going for the photo journalistic editorial style captioning, the short vignette about their life ala HONY, and the why I love this photo approach. I don’t know how this project will pan out and what sort of format the accompanying writing will take. At the moment I just want to start.

Starting up

I have to say I am nervous and hesitant at starting up again. I am not sure exactly what this stems from but I dont think it is entirely to do with the fear of asking a stranger for their portrait — I think I am done with that side of things — I know I can do it. I think where the issue lies is with my fear of using up someones time, explaining to them what I am doing and telling them all about the project…and then just making a crap photo.

No one is watching, or cares, but there is still that annoying fear of failure, even though I know I can reboot and retry each and every day. Seth Godin drew a great analogy to this with his “unlimited bowling” anecdote on Creative Live 30 days of Genius. He said that in today’s world you can just keep trying, keep going, keep learning and trying things out and you have nothing but time to get it right. I like it.

I have swapped out my daily carry camera and now have a portrait setup in my bag. Heading out this afternoon after a meeting. Let’s see how this goes.