People.....
People......Dammit, they're everywhere!

Yeah, OK, so that's hardly a revelation. I've just never been one to take too many pictures of them - well, besides of the family. I grew up a shy child. By shy, I mean "would not speak to ANYONE at nursery school - including the other kids". When you are as retiring as that, you tend to keep a very small circle of friends. People who, for whatever reason, managed to break through the barriers that shy people erect and who you then become inseperable from. Oh sure, I found my place within some of the social groups of school, but it was generally through access from a more gregarious friend, and these groups became the small places where I eventually would find myself comfortable.

It took a lot to get over shyness - much of it conscious work. It took finding jobs that forced me to talk to people. Retail and bartending mostly. It took taking a course on public speaking wherin I got to learn that it is, in fact, impossible to die of embarrassment. And via those means my circle of acquaintences grew exponentially. My circle of close friends, however, did not. That element of privacy that shy people cherish remained. Moving into technology has had a reversing effect on this. My circle of acquaintances shrinks. My circle of close friends also as the demands of familly life let some of these relationships wither and drift away.

But the shyness still manifests itself in so many ways. Taking pictures of strangers, for example, I find a daunting task. Best done unnoticed. I had to detour to work the other day, and passed by a soup kitchen. The wealth of interesting visual characters there was huge. I paused, put my hand on my camera, and then drove away when the light changed. Didn't take a shot. I mean, what if one of them noticed me?!!! Hell, they might throw me a stern look or something!

Take Rob. Or ruralrob to many on my friends list. He's one of my oldest LJ Friends, and we've met for lunch at least once a year for a while now when he comes up to Ottawa for some of his work with the Canadian AIDS Society. It's always a pleasant affair at the same Indian food restaurant. I always invite him to come out and visit the family for a BBQ, but his schedule is too tight. He always invites Steph and I to drop down to NanookVille for a visit, but on those rare occassions when we get a weekend away from the kids we always head to a swank hotel room for a little adult playtime instead. And we always talk about how we need to find an afternoon one of these years to go shooting together. That doesn't happen either. But it's always a good visit with good food and good conversation.

And after all that, it still took me until this year (yesterday in fact) to point the lens at him. I shot two frames. I had to take the second - the first one was out of focus.



These two? Well hell, you could have danced around 'em playing a tuba and they wouldn't have noticed. Young love and spring fever make for an all-consuming state of mind. OK, I can take a shot of them....from 100 feet away. Behind a tree.




This guy? Safely asleep. No problem....I'll shoot him from 40 feet. You know, in case he wakes up.



I wish I worked a little closer to downtown so that my noon-hour wanderings could focus a bit more on shooting people. Force myself to take those shots as they present themselves whether people notice me or not. Fact is that there isn't much around here, unless I want to document the various shapes and sizes of the asses of joggers running along the river. An interesting project idea.... but no. But I think I might try and change the trajectory and focus of my noon wanderings this summer. Stalking wildlife is still, for me, the best way to shift focus away from everything else in life and give me a moment or two of mental vacation, and shooting people will not give me that at all - so my wildlife shooting won't change. I just find myself regressing in my comfort level at being around people, and I need to nip that trend in the bud.

For starters, I figured I'd try and sneak up on myself while I was otherwise distracted. It was darned hard to do, but I managed it.



Yeah, OK, that was gratuitous. But I still try and post at least ONE pic of myself each and every year. I'm sure that there is at least one or two new friends around here that have no damned clue what I look like.


So my summer photo project is to make sure that I get at least one good picture of a complete stranger each and every week. That may not sound like much to most people, but for me it's a pretty big stretch.

Let's see how it goes.