Expressive portraits

Shooting people is my weak point

Shooting people is not my thing, I know that. This is my weak point and I have to work on it if I want to improve my photography. An integral part of travel photography is the people that shape the culture of the country. I have always been shy of asking people to photograph them. Most the shots of people I have, are taken from far away without the people noticing that I was taking a picture. When I was in Madagascar I was really determined to take a lot of portraits of people. Therefore I prepared myself and bought a lot of sweets to give to the children in exchange of a photo. However courage failed me and I gave out the sweets without taking any close up portraits of people.

Every photographer has Steve McCurry’s photo of the Afghan Girl in mind when it comes to portraits. It is the perfect example good lighting, eyes sharply in focus,  a matching background, the perfect composition etc. I am not just afraid of asking people to pose for a portrait. I am also afraid that they are not patient enough to wait for me to find the right light and correctly compose the photo. However if I never start trying I will never get at least a decent portrait during my travels.

My targets

So what does the image above has to do with all this? Obviously the image above does not portray anyone from a far away land with an exotic culture and was not taken during any of my travels since as I said earlier I never had the courage to even seriously try. It is a picture of my cousin’s incredibly cute daughter, in an attempt to try some portraits. I am posting it here because I have learned the most important thing about portraits. Thanks to it I simply found a love for portraits which I never knew existed. I hope it will give me enough courage to try to capture some nice shots of people when I am abroad as well.

Check out my favourite portraits in the gallery section.