Hubris

This is actually a shot from the same day where I captured 'Mass Transit'. Once I noticed the good light, I kind of went to town with the portraits.

In a lot of ways, I feel like this sort of tight, close-up portrait (basically something near a head shot) is kind of a challenging thing to do well. Not the technical stuff (which can also be hard), or even the implementation (ditto). I'm talking about that to a lot of people who look at pictures, there is an emotional disconnect with portraits of strangers.

This one is a toughie for me, since one of best things about getting my first dSLR was that photos of people 'looked right'. I'd never taken pictures of people before that on vacations or whatever since they didn't seem to be rendered the way I thought they should be. Once I discovered that my camera could make faces the way they ought to be, I was pretty hooked.

This isn't everybody though. So, when I try to get a portrait of someone on the street, I try to go for something with character that draws people in. Character, or some emotion we can understand and relate to. Best of all if it's character and emotion, and it's in some nice mass transit-driven lighting.