There’s something about taking photos of people without showing their faces. Faces are valuable and important, obviously, but leaving them out does something. It forces the viewer to look at the rest of the person’s posture, clothing, surroundings. It gives the chance, relatively rare in photographs, to see things as the subject sees them. It creates that ingredient of all good photos: a question. How much of the answer it gives is up to the photographer. It can be fun, and it’s not something I let myself do often for papers.

There’s something else about the detail shot, the tight composition. It can strip away almost all context, forcing the viewer to look, really see the subject. It can be a bit artistic, really, cutting the image down to its constituents of color and form and texture. It gives just a tidbit of the larger whole’s character, while also leaving another question. I first got interested in photography because of the game of finding the splashes and details and patterns around me that most people miss. But as you might’ve seen, most of the street stuff I’ve taken has been really wide. I decided to even it out a bit this time around. Most of the tight shots are from within a few blocks of downtown.

Those are the two themes for this post, I suppose, though there are one or two miscellaneous images in here, too. I hope they’re nice to look at. Thanks for looking!

Dan