Sunday, October 29, 2006

Kate

As I mentioned, I've started this project to take pictures of all of our friends in Austin. (So if you fall in this category - feel free to offer up your support and time to help me out with this!) I'm trying to take simple, natural light portraits. Quick and easy, nothing too elaborate, to have a collection of great pictures of our friends. Some day Amanda & I might move on from Austin and I hope this would be a great memento of our time here and the people we shared it with. The other part of this project is to get me over my shyness and fear of taking pictures of people. Getting up close and personal with the camera is intimidating for me, yet I always love the results and the buzz I get from taking a really satisfying picture. So I'm trying to push through this aversion to taking portraits. Slowly getting there! Kate was kind enough to be the first person after Amanda in on this project. We spent a fun Saturday afternoon catching up on her various vacations and taking a few pictures around her house. Kate's also a photographer so has some idea about the fears and barriers I'm trying to work through, so that helped me out a lot. She also came up with good ideas for locations in her house.

1 comments:

ursula said...

Aha! People pictures. I fell the same shyness, and yet, for me they also are some of the most satisfying images to make. What I've found so very curious about people is that frequently the very things that I think makes them most attractive are the things they will try to hide, or diminish. Sort of like nobody wants their personality to shine through - it has to be the Walmart standard image instead. Weird.

I think in this image Kate's personality shines through, just a bit. She has this encouraging look in her eyes, and her mouth also, even the slant of her head/body, she seems like a person that would be very willing to help another. I'm probably thinking this more because of your introduction than from the picture. It's so easy to deceive myself into thinking I know something when I really don't.

From a purely photo point of view, her skin looks a bit pale in light of the purple (or, IMHO purple is not her best colour). Uh, oh. I would imagine her in a rich green or maybe heathery blue to complement her eyes, or warm oranges to bring out the beautiful tones in her hair. Goodness, the things one thinks of when looking at an image! How funny it is that someone who doesn't know this person at all feels entitled to think I know what colour clothing would look good on her. Oh well.