alceste’s photography advice

How to photograph people when you’re not good at it:

1. Start with dead people.
2. Next, people in comas.
3. Move up to sleeping people.
4. How about someone drunk?
5. Congratulations! Now you’re ready for someone awake and alive.

I’ve always felt weird about the fact that I take so few photographs of people. It’s this great gaping hole in any collection of my shots. Madagascar? Lemurs and landscapes. France? Wall murals. Any city anywhere? Machines, extreme floral closeups, and dead leaves. China is probably the only exception, and there are so many people there you simply can’t avoid getting them in your shots. My father, from whom I got the bug, at least took pictures of sporting events for the school paper. You know, people. In motion. Before he got down to the serious capture of dead leaves. And some very nice photos of my mother.

I’m the ultimate post-apocalyptic photographer. I’m training for the day I wake up and everyone else has mysteriously disappeared. To look at my photos, you’d think that had already happened.

It wasn’t such a big deal in Madagascar, actually, because I was there with Slice, and all he ever takes pictures of are people and sunsets. Seriously. I still have the double prints, years after the breakup. Sunsets sunsets sunsets. Sunsets with clouds. Sunsets over mountains. Sunsets through car windows. Sunsets with power lines. Sunsets with a big blurry finger poking in from the side. My last gift to him was a reasonably good film camera that was really more than I could afford, because the little plastic thing he was using sucked, and wasn’t giving him the best sunsets he could get.

But he was also good at people. Some of the very few photos of myself I can stand are his (if we don’t count the camping ones where he snuck up and took pictures of my butt as I rolled up my sleeping bag), and there are some wonderful ones from the beach in Morondava, where we met three great little kids who laughed as they tried to braid our short hair and taught us an elaborate game of keep-away with the waves. Part of what I love about those photos is that the light was perfect, late-in-the-day light with its own sweet color, but I have to give Slice credit for making his subjects comfortable enough that they relax into the process. Other than the guy who wanted money because Slice had photographed his pig, of course. But there was no helping that.

Point being, if he and pooled our photos from that trip, you would get a fairly comprehensive idea of what it had been like. Look at mine alone... Well, you’re fine if you like lemurs. And tortoises. And crocodiles sleeping at the crocodile farm. And bugs. And poignant photos of bags of charcoal for sale, as the island’s once-great forests are systematically turned into fuel. But no people.

So I worked on it while I was away. Diligently. My new digital lets me take advantage of a pretty broad light spectrum, and not having to think about film is the most freeing experience imaginable. I can take a lot of shots, without setting up too carefully, and throw them all away if I want to. Which means I’m taking more risks, and getting more casual. I also had a captive group of subjects who generally tolerated the camera. Which was huge for me; a big part of my challenge is feeling like I’m intruding, or just being (and I know this will surprise some who know me) incredibly shy. So I usually don’t try at all. The other critics ribbed me a little at first, but then promptly forgot the camera, and suddenly I was starting to get shots that I liked. Even better, I was starting to get shots that they liked. My last night there, I printed a few out to show to Curls, and before I’d made it back to my room people were coming up to me. I hear you have pictures!

So now I can go back to my leaves for a while.