Tuesday, January 11, 2011

The 100 Portraits Project: #1 & #2

2011 is here and this year I am dreaming big!

Ever since I had my hands on a camera, I have wanted to create a compilation of the photos I have taken. I have long dreamed of creating coffee table books with all my shots for the world to see. And this year I am starting a project that will hopefully be the precursor to my very first coffee table book.

The project I am doing is to take 100 portraits of different people. My inspiration for this project came from Danny Santos, whom I look up to as a photographer because of his unique style of street portraiture. I have long been amazed by his output and fascinated by his style. He has done the "100 Strangers" project, a street portraiture project where the photographer shoots portraits of random people out on the streets. Well, he is based in Singapore which is a melting pot of cultures so he has plenty of subjects to choose from.

Another inspiration came from Chris Owens, a photographer based in Texas, USA. He is currently at #73 of his "100 Portraits in 100 Days" project. His project entails him to shoot everyday of the week or at least produce an output for 100 days straight. Its fairly hard to do even if he is based in America; and if you see his output, every shoot is totally different.

Since it would be hard to shoot beautiful strangers here in Davao City and I have a busy weekday schedule, I decided just to do 100 Portraits for the year 2011 and then compile them in a book. Parts of it will be studio shoots, outdoor shoots and candid stuff. In this project, I'll start using tools like Photoshop and the other photo editing software that I usually do not use because I am just too lazy to edit photos. I'm hoping to enhance both my skills in portraiture as well as my post processing with this project.

And as a start to the project, here are the first two portraits for my project. I have 98 more to go... so wish me luck!

Portrait #1: Keyt
Portrait #1: Keyt

Portrait #2: Anne
Portrait #2: Anne