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Keep pointing the camera at them….
By ravsitar | July 2, 2009
Three weeks in a row. Not too shabby. Don’t expect it to keep going. Eventually I’ll run out of photos to post. And when I don’t have photos, I generally don’t post on my blog.
So for today I wanted to write about taking photos of friends. My friends (and their kids) have been photo subjects ever since I’d moved to Minneapolis. For the first year or so, they insisted on making a photo-face of some sort. They pulled a fake smile, made a face, or looked away. Those photo-faces make it so hard to get a good photo of people when you’re close to them. The photos come out useless (making a face or looking away) or posed looking.
This is why I like doing candid street photography with a long telephoto (70-300mm) lens. I can take a photo of a subject who can’t see me. I get natural expressions that way. No photo-faces that way. The downside is you can’t get a connection with the subject in the photo.
Of course candids of friends and family while you’re in the room are hard to do without being noticed. Diving behind the couch kinda detracts from the moment. So you’re stick with more mid range focal lengths (24-70mm) and the subject will be aware of you. How do you deal with that?
I dealt with it by keeping the camera out and just wearing them down. I always have my camera around and just keep taking photos until they are just so tired of making photo-faces that they just ignore the camera. For the most part, I can take photo of my friends from in the room and have them not really react to me. The kids are a bit different. Every time I get out the camera, they need a few minutes of showing off before they start ignoring it. So just give them their show off time and they calm down.
You can see photos of my friends over on my Flickr page: Friends Set, Best of the Bug Set, Alex Set, Kai Set
So for photos today, I have a few photos from a hot afternoon walking around Long Lake Park and a few photos of my friends from an evening of setting around relaxing.
You can see more “Out for a Walk” photos over on my Flickr page here:
You can see more photos of this evening over on my Flickr site:
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