Portraiture

I mentioned portraits in my previous post. That's because it's something that's been on my mind. Over the years I have taken lots of photographs of people that could pass for portraits. Never have I asked their permission. Admittedly they have mostly been friends, family, or co-workers, who I have photographed. People who have got accustomed to an idiot with a camera and come to expect to have it pointed in their direction.

Occasionally I have shot people in the same way when engaging them in conversation. They see the camera in my hand and don't seem to mind when I focus on them. Then there are the street photos of people who rarely know they have been photographed.

These are all the kind of photos I prefer to both make and to look at. So it was a bit of a surprise when I found myself asking a shopkeeper if I could take his photo on Sunday when doing my rounds recreating my old pictures. I was taking one outside his emporium, showed him what I was doing and got chatting. What made me ask I don't know. But I did. And being out of my comfort zone took one fairly hasty snap. A half step to the right would have shifted that vertical in the background.

It's yet another shot that has something going  for it, but isn't quite 'there'. In colour it gives a better sense of context, revealing more the feel of the environment. The monochrome conversion works in a different way, black and white always adds an air of 'seriousness' to such shots. I'm undecided.

A technical aside is that I focussed manually. Something I find myself doing quite frequently these days. It's not that autofocus is unreliable, just that the sensors are often in the wrong place, or it takes too long to move them into the right place.

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