home.

family.

after not being home for a month and finally getting some time of of school to relax, the last thing i wanted to do was pick up the camera and start shooting my assignment. this was one of the harder assignment for me so far, simply because it is not how i am used to shooting. i would much rather wander around outside by myself for several hours and get lost in thought...just me and the camera, no distractions.

i thought about just doing a series of still lives to represent my family, but i felt like i really needed focus on practicing portraiture.

shooting people is hard enough for me, i hate that the image depends so much on what the person is doing and that in a split second the perfect moment could be gone. people are also so weird around the camera, forcing themselves to look how they think i want them to instead of just relaxing and letting me do my thing. it's rather frustrating to say the least.

what was even more difficult is the mere fact that this was my family. i as a photographer i feel like when i am shooting i am separated from everything else in the world...everything that is going on around me. it's hard to stay involved and still focus on doing a project. this made things difficult, especially because it was during the holidays. it was a challenge for me to take part in the festivities and catch up with family members that i haven't seen in months, and yet still remain an artist and focus on making images. there were so many ideas i had before getting together with my family, but by the end of the night i had only tried out one.

in the end i wound up just dedicating an entire day to shooting, from the time i woke up, all the way through dinner. this made it easier because as the day went on everyone became relatively used to having the camera in their face, and i actually had some fun with it.

after viewing everyone else's project's in class during critique, i realized, once again, how much power one has as a photographer. depending on how you choose to portray a situation entirely depends on how the viewer perceives it. it's strange to think how something as real and true as family can be manipulated however you like. issues between family members can be ignored, softened, exaggerated, mocked....relationships can be made to look or perfect or on the brink of disaster. reality can change depending on how you as a photographer want to portray it...