So moving on, this afternoon I went to Conway, Arkansas with 3 other guys in my advanced photography class to do a project. We were given a list of things found in any city, and were told to choose a city and take pictures of the things on a list. They were mostly generic things...a statue, a body of water, the most popular attraction in the city, something showing motion, a night shot, something funny..things like that. We had a list of 30 and we had to find as many as we could. Most of them didn’t take too long, and it came around 6 o’clock or so and we decided to stop and eat. We found this very nice (we were completely under-dressed) italian place and ate there. We were there for 2 hours, so we had plenty of time to figure out how many more pictures we needed and decided all we needed was a picture of an old person. That’s all the paper said, a picture of an old person. Being almost 9, we decided we had better find someone in the restaurant because we weren’t going to find many old people out that late. This would obviously prove to be slightly awkward. “Hello sir or mame. I am doing a photography assignment and would you mind if I interrupt your meal in this fine restaurant to take a random picture of you?” uh...no. But we had to do it, so one of the other guys and I decided to get up and leave (after paying of course) and hope that one of the other guys would take the picture. No Luck.
So after walking outside, trying to decide what we were going to do, because none of us wanted to ask anyone in the italian place, I see this guy. He was standing there, leaning up against a building, smoking a cigarette. The lighting was good, there were cool lights down the street, he was old, it was perfect. So ignoring my partners making fun of each other, I approached the dude. I told him I was doing a project, and asked if I could take his picture. He seemed cool with it until I said he should just stand there, act like i wasn’t there, and continue on smoking his cigarette. For some reason the fact that I told him to just keep on smoking offended him or something. He sort of went into defensive mode. “are you serious?” he said. Quickly confused, I was just like, “uh, ya. It’s just for a school project.” I was getting slightly worried that I angered him. He mumbled something about no, not smoking, I won’t have that. So I told him, oh ok. That’s ok, do you still mind if I take a picture without smoking? He grumbled something and said it was fine, so i quickly took it, showed it to him, thanked him, and left. In the end, I came away with a great image, probably the best one from the whole day.
As I walked away I could only wonder about this guy’s story. What was it about the possibilities cigarette and him smoking it in the picture that he didn’t like? There are so many . He could have been smoking since he was twelve but is needing to stop because the doctor told him. Maybe it’s because he is having marital problems with his wife because of smoking, or his kids. Maybe there’s a smoking law in Conway I don’t know about and he didn’t want any proof he was breaking it. For all I know maybe he was just a pissy old man. All I know is that my camera+him smoking=not a happy dude. But I get all that from just one image, taken in 1/6th of a second....
2 comments:
Nice shot David. Great job on the lighting and the framing. Funny thought, as I was reading the post I was thinking of someone way older than this guy looks. I guess age is relative.
we were really looking for someone older than him. there were some people in the restaurant older than him, but i loved this shot
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