Disturbance/Proximity

“If your pictures aren’t good enough,
you’re not close enough.”

-war photographer Robert Capa

Photography class.
I still have mixed feelings about it.
For this next assignment, we were asked to apply principles of disturbance and proximity.

SELF CRITIQUE:

For this assignment, I made sure to keep my camera with me at all times; toting the Nikon around in my backpack to each class, letting it hang around my neck at Wal-Mart, and bringing it to dinners, baking parties, and the movies (yeah right, like I’m going to take pictures in a movie theater). Nonetheless, the assignment went by easier for the most part and as I type this, I still have about 20 photos to narrow down from. The biggest difficulty with this assignment proved to be the disturbance aspect. I assume that shooting with a zoom lens (18-55) would make this aspect easier because you would simply need to frame the photos and then just zoom in. For my photos however, I used my 35 mm the whole assignment and so…I just felt awkward trying to recrop photos by moving closer. Personal photographer problems. Typical. Another obstacle that arose during the assignment was the challenge of photographing strangers. In Guatemala this summer, I had no problem doing just that: “Por favor, puedo tomar un foto?” But for some reason, I felt a tad awkward asking random UT students, and especially the old man smoking a blunt (particularly when my friend gave me an “are-you-serious” look). Thankfully, I stepped out of my comfort zone and got back to enjoying photography during this assignment.

Proximity

For these three photos, two of them had to feature a stranger as the subject. Tad awkward to approach people on the drag, but people were surprisingly cooperative when told that it was for a photography assignment.