This assignment was a tough one – chat up a stranger and shoot their picture. Get their first name. Naturally, the assignment scared the crap out of me, so I hedged my bets and went to the bar at my usual coffee shop (shout out to Makers and Finders, Las Vegas). It took a while to crack the ice while we surfed on our respective smart phones. I found an entry to start chatting midway through his breakfast by asking about his eggs benedict.
Johnny is a Las Vegas long timer (came with his father in the Air Force) and has been working in hospitality his whole life. He currently does room service at the MGM grand so while I was starting my day, he was ending his. Once the ice was broken, we had a really good chat. As a recent transplant to this city, the ridiculousness that the service industry folks puts up with is still amusing and interesting to me.
About twenty minutes in, I got the courage to ask him let me take a couple photos of him for this “podcast I listen to with weekly assignments” and he happily agreed. As you can see, the backlit lighting conditions was pretty brutal, and the only way to make it a decent image was to just crush the blacks even though I hated losing his sleeve tattoo. I’m not super happy with it, but out of respect to the flow of the conversation I only took two shots (I included the other shot, just auto adjusted by the Mac Photos program). One takeaway with this assignment is that I still need to get better at working my iphone so I’m better prepared for another one or two shot situation like this.
The only reason I pushed through this assignment was because all the previous OTP assignments had taught or showed me something new. Even so, it took an enormous amount of faith in you to go through with this one. Happily I can say that like the other assignments it paid off – maybe not the greatest image, but definitely for the memorable conversation.
