Paco_X
Stranger #118 : Maya
Stranger #118’s portrait was a pane….literally (spelling correct).
I was at the Cleveland Museum of Art walking through a glass encased corridor from one section of the building to another. Looking out the window, I saw Stranger #118 across a small courtyard and herself inside of a glass encased gallery of sculptures. It was her hat that initially grabbed my attention, but through the multiple glass barriers I thought she looked like a potentially compelling subject. The first challenge was to find her. I had to make my way through a maze of an ancient Asian gallery before I finally found the entrance to the secret sculpture gallery.
Along with my potential model, there was one other woman in the room (who I thought might be with her although I was not certain) and a museum worker. The museum worker concerned me as there was no discreet way to approach a stranger in this relatively small echo chamber. I feared he might take issue with turning the gallery into an impromptu portrait studio, so I decided to bide my time and hope that the worker exited the room before my stranger. It was my lucky day. About two minutes later he casually strolled out leaving me alone with the ladies.
I wasted no time and made my approach. My inclination was correct…the two ladies were together. The other woman was my stranger’s mother. This made for a little bit of a new (and slightly awkward) situation for me, but it turned out that I think the mother was more intrigued by my project than my model. Her name was Maya, and although I had eyed her up through the refraction of several layers of glass, now that I was face to face with her I could see that as a stranger model she was all that I could have hoped for. Everyone was on board for the portrait and we still had this unique room to ourselves, so we got straight to work.
There was a slight temptation to incorporate the sculptures into the portrait (they were ancient Indian works). If I had time to think about a composition I am sure I could have dreamed up something cool and unique, but working on the fly I was concerned that a sculpture might appear to be a forced and out-of-place prop. So instead, I decided to simply incorporate all of the glass walls that were already integral to this encounter. We went to the corner of the gallery, and I positioned Maya so that not only was she backed by the glass walls of our gallery, but also behind that was the glass corridor from which I had initially spied her. I thought the vertical lines from the seams between the myriad of glass panels would make for a decent backdrop. What I did not anticipate was the fantastic turquoise color. It did not appear particularly blue when we were standing there. I did do some minor tweaking of the cyan levels in pp, but clearly my camera sensor was picking up color through all of that refracted glass that we could not see with our eyes. What a pleasant surprise.
Check out the rest of the stranger street portraits in my project at Paco's 100 Strangers Project and find out more about the project and see pictures taken by other photographers at the 100 Strangers Flickr Group page.
Stranger #118 : Maya
Stranger #118’s portrait was a pane….literally (spelling correct).
I was at the Cleveland Museum of Art walking through a glass encased corridor from one section of the building to another. Looking out the window, I saw Stranger #118 across a small courtyard and herself inside of a glass encased gallery of sculptures. It was her hat that initially grabbed my attention, but through the multiple glass barriers I thought she looked like a potentially compelling subject. The first challenge was to find her. I had to make my way through a maze of an ancient Asian gallery before I finally found the entrance to the secret sculpture gallery.
Along with my potential model, there was one other woman in the room (who I thought might be with her although I was not certain) and a museum worker. The museum worker concerned me as there was no discreet way to approach a stranger in this relatively small echo chamber. I feared he might take issue with turning the gallery into an impromptu portrait studio, so I decided to bide my time and hope that the worker exited the room before my stranger. It was my lucky day. About two minutes later he casually strolled out leaving me alone with the ladies.
I wasted no time and made my approach. My inclination was correct…the two ladies were together. The other woman was my stranger’s mother. This made for a little bit of a new (and slightly awkward) situation for me, but it turned out that I think the mother was more intrigued by my project than my model. Her name was Maya, and although I had eyed her up through the refraction of several layers of glass, now that I was face to face with her I could see that as a stranger model she was all that I could have hoped for. Everyone was on board for the portrait and we still had this unique room to ourselves, so we got straight to work.
There was a slight temptation to incorporate the sculptures into the portrait (they were ancient Indian works). If I had time to think about a composition I am sure I could have dreamed up something cool and unique, but working on the fly I was concerned that a sculpture might appear to be a forced and out-of-place prop. So instead, I decided to simply incorporate all of the glass walls that were already integral to this encounter. We went to the corner of the gallery, and I positioned Maya so that not only was she backed by the glass walls of our gallery, but also behind that was the glass corridor from which I had initially spied her. I thought the vertical lines from the seams between the myriad of glass panels would make for a decent backdrop. What I did not anticipate was the fantastic turquoise color. It did not appear particularly blue when we were standing there. I did do some minor tweaking of the cyan levels in pp, but clearly my camera sensor was picking up color through all of that refracted glass that we could not see with our eyes. What a pleasant surprise.
Check out the rest of the stranger street portraits in my project at Paco's 100 Strangers Project and find out more about the project and see pictures taken by other photographers at the 100 Strangers Flickr Group page.