Photo blogging attempt number 2

Here's a photo I took while in Morocco for two weeks. I have really no idea where we were when I took this picture, because basically I arrived there in the back of a van with no windows that was normally used to haul sheep. The trip was organized by a journalist as an extension of the one week our study abroad group spent in Fez. Life in the Middle Atlas mountain range is needless to say quite different from life in the cities of Morocco. I know French, some Arabic, and I picked up a little bit of the Moroccan dialect, but in the middle atlas there is yet another language - that of the Berbers. Most of the time we would run around making sheep noises at the kids, because 'Baaa' is a universal language.

I'm not exceptionally talented when it comes to photography. I've taken 3 classes - two of them summer courses and one at a community college and the other class I took in high school. Over winter break I received for the first time money in exchange for taking family portraits for a friend of the family - at which point I felt so guilty about being overpaid that I used half of the money to make a book of the photos I took for them.

I've recently become interested in portrait photography, probably because it is somehow innately scary for me, and thus exciting. It's hard to explain but, it makes sense that it's a lot easier to point a camera at a flower, a crowd, or even at someone who doesn't know that you are photographing them than to take someone you know and who knows what you are doing and to basically stare at them through a camera lens. The community college class that I took however was a portrait class, so after putting it off for a while, I had to eventually come to terms with this new kind of photography. It ended up being really exciting. Just to clarify, I'm not talking about sitting someone in front of a drape with artificial lighting shinning in their face. I stuck my mom in the middle of a field of sun flowers, I made people jump up and down on their lawns, and generally used natural light and outdoor settings.

It's interesting seeing how my friends reacted towards a camera, and not just in the typical snapshot setting. There's a difference between "say cheese" and basically snapping 10 pictures in a span of a few minutes. Everyone knows how to smile for a camera, but no one really knows what to do when you can't hold the smile anymore and the pictures don't stop. My one friend found her inner model, and while she looked good in all the photos, they were all a little too posed. Another less photogenic friend was completely normal in spite of the camera and while the photo I ended up with might not have been vogue material, she looked real and just like I know her to be.

One of the many somewhat random and small goals I have in life is to have in some form a collection of Portraits that I've taken of people that mean something to me, and maybe even of people I don't really know, that show somehow their true selves. Not an easy task, but it should be a fun life-long project.

-N