Today’s post will be written in English, because the person I photographed this afternoon is no native speaker in German. To accomplish today’s challenge, I had to portray a stranger after I asked for it. So, it’s similar to “Eine unbekannte Person” but completely different as well…
In the warm and sunny afternoon, I decided to have a stroll along Isar river in Freising. The weather made all the people wanting to hang out at the gravel banks at the riverside. After I asked a couple of people, I came along two women and they were fine with me taking pictures of them.
I went for some backlit shots, as I like the sunny background. Another plus for a backlit situation: The model doesn’t have to close her eyes and could instead use them for her smile.
At first, the situation was a bit uncomfortable. But with the talking, the ice finally melted and I took a bunch of pictures of one of the women. While talking about her studies here in Germany (she’s from Costa Rica and a student at Weihenstephan), I completely forgot to ask about her name. So she remains kind of an unknown person to me.
Maybe she writes an email to me to get the pictures, so I can ask her for her name.
For my settings, I used a wide aperture of f/2.5 with a low ISO 50. I love the bokeh produced by my nifty-fifty lens. Cheap glass doesn’t have to be bad glass…
The two tasks in which I had to photograph complete strangers taught me a lot about that field of photography. It takes a lot of courage to talk strangers into photographing them. But once I overcame the barrier, it is lots of fun. I liked it and I’m definitely going for some more soon.
