I often see people and think that I’d like to take their portrait. It sounds creepy in my head as I write that but I promise it’s a fairly widespread idea. I just happen to think certain people look interesting but I don’t ever do anything about it. I worry my social skills are not up to it. I’m not a good first impression kind of guy in a lot of ways. There are many reasons. My neutral face frightens people. I tend to be reserved. As a kid who moved a lot, I had two choices become outgoing and gregarious or do the opposite. I chose the latter.
But you see a photo at the top of this post. A photo I took of a stranger. That may not seem like a big deal to many of you but it took some serious psyching up for me to do that. It’s not the best picture but it does represent something I’m glad I did.
That’s the interesting thing here. The #ds106 course gave me the structure to make some assignments and one I put up there was the stranger portrait photography assignment (visualassignment29). I had been thinking about it for a while. Once I wrote it down, it kept coming back to me. I couldn’t make an assignment for someone else that I was too scared to do. It took some time, but I finally decided to do it this morning. I wouldn’t have gotten an F had I not done. I mean, I created the assignment AND I gave it to myself. There was no force compelling me to step into a place where I wasn’t comfortable. I couldn’t talk about learning in the open and trying new things if I didn’t do something I was truly scared to do.
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