Portrait Posing With Phraction: (that’s a terrible title..)

There’s a common misconception that because I shoot people on the street, that taking portraits would be a piece of cake. If by cake you mean something like making an 18 layer Baumkuchen (look it up, it’s super hard you guys), then yes, it’s exactly like that. When push comes to shove though you do what you gotta do. Luckily Karyn is very patient actor/model that I had the pleasure of shooting for the streetvogs project about a month ago

Wanting to mix things up a bit from the usual candid street stuff, I figured shooting a portrait of someone who owned a pair of fluevogs would be the key. Going outside of my comfort zone and challenging myself to make mistakes is something that people do sometimes do for fun for growth and stuff. Seeing that I’m pretty much done physically growing, I might as well you know, do it for creativity. Because skillz.

I suppose that when your primary objective is to feature the shoes, one should probably do that. I decided to unintentionally be a rebel and… not. Because I forgot.. SO that happened and my only saving grace was to see if I had a full-length shot that I could crop into to get a decent shot. In this day and age where “megapixels don’t matter” has found it’s way into the average conversation, I found one time when it actually does. Albeit 16MP is somewhat low apparently, for web, it’s perfectly fine. Grainy and unsharp? You bet. But what I’ve come to realize is that the details we see in our own images (or lack thereof) are sometimes illusions compared to what the majority of people actual see - the big picture.

So here’s to refining some skills, silly mistakes, and shooting enough material to save yourself when your brain suddenly decides to exit stage right.

Oh and I almost forgot to mention… after all the effort in working on that shoe shot - I never ended up using it. I was reminded that the project was about the ‘unique souls’ more than the 'unique soles’ so all that work retouching it, kinda went out the window. But for anyone curious, here’s what the original shot, the cropped shot, and the retouched version ultimately looked like…

(click here to see it larger)