Take portrait photo of strangers

Here is the assignment

"make a portrait of someone you dont know, someone you have just met. Be brave, be creative, and work with them to express the thing you see about them."

this is challenging but it is not brutal. Yes, I tried different people but I did not have a feeling of satisfied with the result though. I should try to ask people who agreed me to photograph to work with me to create a portrait rather than I just take what they give me.

also i learnt from the critique that i had to move too, not just sitting there and take what I am given. Hard to ask the subject move sometimes, but ok, i could move my ass a bit.

the other point is to recognize the photographic moment. for example, one participant saw a man walking out of his field with a strange mask, he turned his vehicle and asked the man for him to take a photo. he got an yes, and the subject removed his mask. He took several but asked the subject to wear the mask.

it is hard lesson. Sometimes we can feel it. sometimes we dont. and this thing I would say it is more the photography's intuition. this one cant be taught. it is just simply easily said than done.

anyway, here is the image i chose to submit.

He looked very interesting. he was drunken. so was his friend who also looked very handsome. Both of them were creative people and they gave me compliment when they saw my drawing. they asked why i did not go to study at the University of Fine Art. I told them I did not want to go to the school for creativity because i would be destroyed. They laughed and they said "right, if you want to make art, just do it. You dont need a school to learn to do thing".

Ironically, one of them, the handsome one, was a teacher of woodcut, at the University of Industrial Fine Art. I felt like we could understand each other language. no, we seemed to speak the same language. One suggested me to take pictures of trees in Hanoi, especially in the winter, and the other told me to take portrait photos of artists who were born and lived in Hanoi.

i told them i would think about it and I might need their help later. I took several pictures of this man and I was quite disappointed that the images were not strong and sharp enough. He was nice, but I did not dare to ask him to move or pose for me and I was so much annoyed by the background. I did not master the camera yet at that time too. but somehow, i like this image. there is some generally familiarity in this photo. It is a Hanoian man with his rice wine and his eyes, his clothes and even the untidy and ugly background are so much of Hanoi. Now, I hate the Vietnamese word in the yellow background, but it also says something later too. The small advertisement say "móc mật, bánh tôm" indicating the food vendor is selling them "Mắc mật, móc mật, mác mật, if the name of Clausena indica. if I took out of the background and focus on his face, it would tell another story, yet I prefer to know more later about his context if I had these attributes.

then I decided to take another man's portrait when I was waiting for my bus.

here is the subject.

I loved this photo of him. He looked difficult but somehow, this photo showed the softness in his man. It also showed that he took care of his outfit (although not his pants and I wished I had a ball to ask him to let me to take a photo of his full body while he stood. although with that, it would tell about him differently too.). he was different from other men that he had nice hat and the top and I knew that it was not by accident. it was not common for men who did not have formal job and lived in the small town to wear like this. I did not get any critique from this photo. I guess it was not interesting though.

I took more people, but i guess, after I learnt from the critiques of other folks' work, many I took was not either interesting nor not real portraits.