People In Pictures? It's Just Crazy Enough To Work!

One of the things that I love about digital photography is the instant gratification factor.  When I learned about photography in college using a 35mm film camera, there were usually several days delay between when I took a picture and when I actually got to see the photo.  By then, I could easily have forgotten how I got the shot (settings, lighting, and so on).  On top of that, with only 24 or 36 pictures per roll of film, as a poor college student I always felt like every shot was expensive and precious.   With a modern digital camera, you take a picture, you see it right away.  If you don't like it, you delete it and try again.  That totally changes the way I take pictures because it encourages me to be liberal with my photos, taking dozens or hundreds where before I would have taken only a few.  It also encourages me to be experimental and try out new techniques and approaches.

The downside of that is taking an endless series of throw-away test photos as opposed to photographing something that would be compelling to anyone other than another photographer.  I have tons of these shots.  Some of them are interesting enough that they get posted here, but I recognize that they're not necessarily great photographs, just great experiments.  When I realized this about my photography, I started to think about photos that really resonated with people and I discovered something probably obvious to anyone else but enlightening to me:

Most of them involve people.

The hell you say!

I don't take many people photos, except for snapshots of my family of which I take tons.  It's because of I'm naturally introverted.  I'm more comfortable taking controlled shots of inanimate objects.  But realizing that people photos have a built-in compellingness advantage, over the past few weeks I've really warmed up to the idea of taking portraits and candid people shots.  I'm hoping to take far more of them in the future and build some chops in that area.  I even sold some infrequently used music gear to fund getting a decent portraits lens and some lighting gear.  Hopefully, I'll be able to post some of the fruits of this soon.