Jaipur, January 2011

I was at the Jaipur Literature Festival this year, which you already know if you read my blog. But since I've started taking pictures, I find myself more drawn to portraits, or just people interacting with each other. I love my random "arty" shots of trees and buildings and things very close up, but a good picture of a person always thrills me. Especially if I manage to get an expression correct, or capture something I didn't even know I could capture.

One of the problems is, though, that I'm always a little shy of taking pictures of people. I feel like I need to ask permission, or like, acknowledge I'm taking the picture instead of just quickly snapping it and walking away as many other photographers do. It's a dilemma that's raged across internet forums as far as I can see--doing some Google research, I found people were mostly divided.

So what's a (sort of) shy person to do? I went online to Digital Photography School (a great website for beginner's tips, I've learnt a lot just from browsing there) and found this article by street photographer James Maher. His tip was to keep your camera as innocuous as possible, even shooting from the hip, which I wasn't entirely sure I agreed with. I don't know if you've done a lot of pictures of people when you're pointing up the lens at them, but it's never very flattering, and it makes their noses look HUGE. Instead, I hung my camera round my neck and each time I passed something I wanted to click, I very slightly changed the angle of the lens and just pressed the button. It gave me some interesting perspectives as you will see in the last four pictures.

Finally, I stumbled across this blog and this wonderful woman's work, and it made me realise what I want to develop the most in my photos, candid, artless street portraits of people doing their own thing. I have a long, long, LONG way to go, but you know, practice, perfect, etc.