Sit Down, Shut Up, And Let Me Take Your Picture

I recently went on a 25-day Grand Canyon float trip with 13 other people. With such a big group, the people inevitably became as important to the trip as the scenery and the river.

And what a group! Our group dynamics were great and I have a rippling six-pack of abdominal muscles now* from laughing so much.

*this is a lie.

Given my disposition towards photography, it was clear to me that getting photos that accurately captured the character of my new friends was going to be important to the telling of the story of the trip.

And I love photographing my trips. I think I articulated it best as I sat in my dad's living room, reviewing the photos from the trip: "you know why I take so many pictures, Dad? Because I don't remember any of this shit."

But though the light can fade, and clouds can obscure the landscape, and animals can run away, few subjects are as uncooperative as some people. As a result, I have a lot of photos like this one:

Susie doesn't want her picture taken.

Photographs of people are a hard thing to get. To demonstrate, I've made this blog post, which is something of an outtakes reel. There were even more, but I deleted a bunch before I decided that this story needed to be told. Here are a few of the things that can go wrong:

Sometimes, people just get caught with their eyes closed. 

Sometimes they just have to poop.

I know Carla Jo well enough to know that she was just acknowledging the camera. But she sure looks pissed, doesn't she?

And I like taking portraits with the fisheye lens, but they don't really turn out to be flattering photos.

Sometimes working hard in the hot sun leads to funny facial expressions.

And this is all well and good. But one of the biggest problems that I had was a simple lack of cooperation.

For instance, I got Kieran in one of those unfortunate moments. This happens, of course, and is why I take lots of pictures.

But Greg couldn't handle it, and he about shit himself when the shutter clicked a second time. As a result, this nice moment with two bros spending time together in the morning has no usable photos.

And Greg wasn't the only one to get angry at me for taking pictures. Here Susie *actually* shakes her fist at me.

In the rare moments that Greg did pose, he did so sarcastically. Here he shows what a bad influence he could be on the normally cooperative Carla.

  

Sometimes a sarcastic pose can still be a fun one, though, as Bernie and Jake demonstrate.

Because Greg is my friend, I'll put in this not-bad photo of him. It's one of the few that I got.  

Betsy was mostly cooperative and is naturally photogenic, so I got a lot of nice pictures of her. When she did choose to be uncooperative, it mostly took the form of flipping me off. I suppose my feelings should be hurt, but how do you tell a girl this happy that she's wrong?

Sometimes, when a photo goes wrong, it is entirely my fault. Like here I left my camera bag in the foreground. And this one isn't the first photo I've ruined that way.

Sometimes you get a perfectly nice photo, but I might decide that it isn't really fit for use, for fear that I might appear to have *ahem* ungentlemanly intentions.

So I retake the photo with different composition, only to be stymied by a different problem - it was only after taking this photo that I realized that I wasn't aware of what was happening in the background. Another nice photo of Carla Jo gets tossed. 

In the van after the trip I turned around to see Arianna napping on Nick's shoulder. It was cute as shit, so I grabbed my camera and turned around again only to see, too late, that they opened their eyes. The photo, which I meant to be a cute portrait of two good friends, was a disaster.

But sometimes, things work out for the best.