I’m deathly afraid of approaching strangers. I have been since I was a child, and it’s the kind of fear that is magnified even more when approaching strangers with a camera in my hands. This is, as you probably expect, problematic for any one interested in photography, because this fear limits one to shooting just the people one happens to know. Which is fine if you’ve got a million friends, but I’ve been shooting for about a year now and I can honestly say that I’m rapidly running out of new subjects.
And so it was that I decided to conquer this fear on this bright Sunday morning. I set 10 strangers as my initial goal, figuring that it’d take _at least_ that many before I would start to get the hang of it. I’d shoot in UP Diliman campus, as the volume of pedestrians there would be sure to provide me with the subjects I needed. I packed my 85mm prime, widely-regarded as the best lens for this sort of street photography. And off I went.
The first 30 minutes were fairly horrible. I stood along the side of the road and pathetically watched joggers and cyclists go by. There were tons of people, way more than I was really expecting. Just focusing on any one individual was turning out to be tricky, as the background was always too busy.
Eventually, I decided that it’d be impossible to shoot the kind of images I wanted with joggers or cyclists. They were just going too fast, and it wasn’t like I could run alongside them as I shot. What I needed were slow-walkers, or people sitting around resting. And so I began my own slow-walk around the UP oval, pausing occasionally to eye a potential subject, but never actually bringing the camera up to my eye.
The working distance of an 85mm lens on a cropped-sensor body is about 5 or 6 feet for a very close portrait. This is perfect for street photography because you are neither violating anyone’s personal space nor are you too far to actually talk to them. Because, yes, you will have to talk to them. Trying to steal a frame will usually result in a nice picture of the back of someone’s head, because people sense when a lens is being pointed at them and tend to become self-conscious.
I finally got up the courage to approach my first stranger after nearly 45 minutes of walking around aimlessly. She was a teenager in a blue jersey, carrying a little dog in her arms. The camera was already set up, so really all I had to do was go up to her and say, “May I take your picture?” and tap the shutter. I mean, seriously, how hard could that be.
As it happened though, I walked right past her first, before turning around and kinda sheepishly mumbling, “Excuse me, can I take a picture of your dog?” And then, hurriedly: “And you?”
She said, “Yeah sure,” and like the proverbial overly-excited virgin, I thrust my camera at her and … fired prematurely. Before I even looked at the LCD, I knew I had screwed up big-time. I had managed to get the top half of the dog’s head and most of hers into the frame, but the focus was on the trees behind them. Even more sheepishly now, I asked, “Uh, one more? Sorry.”
The second image was still not very good, but at least the foreground was in focus this time. I thanked her, and walked hurriedly away before she could ask to look at what I had taken.
It occurred to me that part of the reason why it was so difficult to approach anyone before was because there is an implicit declaration that you, the photographer, know what you are doing. And 95% of the time behind the lens, I literally have no idea. Finally coming to grips with this notion made me feel a lot better. As long as none of these strangers actually saw how crappy their portraits were turning out, then I was ok.
I spent the next hour botching up most of the 40 images I took, although to my credit, I did shoot more than 10 strangers. The standard line was “Excuse me, may I take your picture?” which I would switch to Tagalog depending on who I was talking to. (When shooting kids, I’d have to ask their moms for permission, and it just seemed more polite to say it in English.) Out of about a dozen approaches, I was rejected only once. And I actually started getting decent images towards the last 15 minutes. These are my two favorites:
The girl in white was hesitant, but I told her that all she had to do was ignore me. The grand-dad, meanwhile, just nodded when I asked, and my focus point just happened to land perfectly on his eyeball. Photo of the day, easily.
You can check out the rest of my new Strangers set on Flickr here.