Night Portrait

Last week I started a series of photos I took while attending Steve Chastain’s, Night Photography class, at the University of Tennessee.  This week’s picture is a little out of the ordinary for me as I’m not generally in to taking pictures of people (especially people I don’t know).  Despite my former instructors’ best efforts, posing people is still kind of awkward and having an idea in your head for what you want the picture to look like is hard for me… with nature photography (or cars or whatever), the objects are immovable and what you see is what you get.  The picture is good, or it isn’t, based on where you put yourself and most importantly what kind of lighting you have.  Anyway, this week’s photo is one that I was happy with from all those exercises.  I really liked the high contrast of the image… the heavy shadows and overpowering highlights.  He’s thinking about something… its up to us to imagine what that is.

–Dan Thompson