It's crazy...when I'm not posting blogs, I'm usually at my busiest, steeped in photographing and editing, so that I have very little time to stop and switch to reporter mode and reflect on what I am seeing. In the past few weeks, I've photographed a beautiful Bat Mitzvah girl, the 75th reunion of Wilson High in Washington, two crew regattas, hats and scarfs for a knitting marketing campaign, and an investment banker's portrait for a website. Not to mention a pre-prom dinner and a Memorial Day weekend beach party.
Whenever I shoot a lot, I ask myself a lot of questions. My first impulse is to see my subjects as stories. The first time I seriously picked up a camera, back in the 70s, I had to make sure my photographs complemented the articles I wrote for a daily regional newspaper. My editor was fiercely critical of every word and image that he published and he demanded strong photos, composed well, sharp, innovative, and intuitive. I was much more afraid of him than I was of anyone's personal space boundaries.
When I started shooting for people...and not for an editor...I had to change my perspective. Making someone look good...making someone look the way they want to look...is much harder than shooting a picture to tell a story. As a photographer, I often step back, taking in a wider palette, to find the essence of my subject's personality at its most attractive and least vulnerable.