Punishing portraits

Having worked late last night and secured myself a little free time today to experiment with finding one or two portrait subjects to practice on today, I was a little more than depressed to discover that this morning brought with it the first cloudy day in Greece in (my) living memory. For a couple of hours in the morning, the sun usually strikes Volos from the east, poking its brilliant rays into every shop window pointing in its general direction. Add to this wonderful quality the fact that many of the shops in Greece are visually intriguing and quite often exceedingly beautiful (or just plain odd) and you’ve got yourself a large choice of places to walk into off the street and see if you can arrange a spontaneous shoot. Or at least you have if it’s light enough or if you’re the owner of a simple lighting kit to overcome the lack of luminosity. Soldiering on (at least I’ve now got a tripod, which is already proving to be more than handy) I managed to get a couple of short spontaneous sessions, first with Irini, who sells the basic ingredients for making traditional Greek sweets out of an almost empty shop with a fabulous, enormous stainless steel fridge at the back of it. Despite Irini’s best efforts at putting every light on, her position far from the window meant that although there was a decent(ish) amount of light, I could see that owning a small portable light to put on her would’ve made the pictures I took just that little better (and, dare I say, more professional). Looking over the shots I see once again that I make far too many appearances in reflective surfaces (which themselves could benefit with the occasional addition of a polarising filter), although I was at least aware of them this time. Am I going blind? Also I’m still subfreezing from picturing what I see in the viewfinder as a two-dimensional picture. Some shots came out so completely different to how they appeared to me. Anyway, more experience and, despite this most gruelling of assignments I continue to improve with each scenario I create. A few grabbed street shots provided a little diversion before heading off to see my carpenter man who once again wasn’t where he was supposed to be. A little further up the road I found an old man in a strange shop selling plastic wrapping in bulk amounts. His environment consisted of a bare room lit by two tiny light bulbs, he spoke no English, I was worried about the light but thought I’d see what I could do anyway as he was quite interesting to look at, and his place of work was equally interesting. Then back home to collect a dog I’ll be looking after for the next few days, as if my life wasn’t full enough already. Hey ho. One other interesting think today was a telephone call I got in the morning from a retired Greek dress designer who I met at the ladies’ do on Sunday evening (she’s the one at the front of the picture with the glasses and 1920s haircut). Among other things she once designed a dress for the late Princess Diana, and, a bit of a local celebrity she’s just got herself a permanent exhibition of her work in a museum here in Volos. She wants to meet me on Thursday to see if I can take some pictures of it. Watch this space. Back briefly to the portraits I realise that I want to create simple, pure ones, with no flashiness beyond what the scene presents to the naked eye. A bit of fun with the subject and a few props is always allowed I think, but ultimately I like to work as simply as possible and without too many pretensions. Among the multitude of other tasks ahead I need to work on lighting. These poor blogs get grabbed whenever I get a spare minute, and I fear I almost never write down what I really want to say. I think what I really want to say can be said with photography. Again, make more time to take photographs!