at least one person other than you has looked at this...

...unless you're jacob. then you could be the only person reading this. which would kinda suck. anyways stop leaving your window when you go to work. i always forget its open when i turn the a/c on.

it's like an art show, except no one else can see how bored you look

some of my black and white favorites from 2009

well, at least i have a homepage. now to actually take some photos

I've thrown a place holder image up so that there's SOMETHING at coynephoto.com but it made me realize that I should be getting a portfolio together so that I have material to show off. As of now all I know is that I don't like landscape or cityscape photography, and weddings are stressful but fun. Modeling sounds fun but I can see it becoming repetitive. Towards the end of June I will be trying fitness modeling to help a friend from high-school (and myself) build a portfolio. I still enjoy photographing children (if they're cute) because of the genuine expressions they usually wear. I'll take some time to gather a few of my more "pleasing" photos to compliment the homepage. I'm also building a facebook fan page for myself in an attempt to look even more shallow.

i know i'm butchering a classic (and personal favorite)

oh god how did this get here I am not good with computer

how to take a flattering picture of someone who doesn't like to be photographed

ANYONE can take a good picture. I like taking portraits of friends and I especially like it when they say they aren't photogenic. wah wah wah too bad. Most people don't like pictures of themselves because they aren't used to seeing themselves, but even WORSE is the fact that most of the pictures people DO LIKE of themselves don't even look like them. It's harder than it sounds to take a picture of someone that makes them look as good as possible, while still looking like the person the rest of us are used to seeing.

so how do you take a good picture of someone? the first step is to STAND BACK. we're used to seeing people from about 15 feet away. from this distance features flatten out and become less prominant. i take almost all of my portraits at about 15-20 feet away.

secondly ZOOM IN. now that you're far away there's bound to be a ton of distracting crap in the picture. you want to take a picture of the person, not the creepy guy in the background. sure it might look funny, but in 10 years when you look back at the picture you'll just want to see MORE of the person. so fill the frame with their face. you're wasting the rest of the photograph by not practicing this.

put them off center. draw a tic-tac-toe board on the picture and put their eyes on one of the lines. off centered pictures like this are more interesting to look at. avoid centering people's faces in the frame. centering a face makes the rest of the photograph feel worthless.

Guess what? both of these are my friends and both of them swore up and down that they weren't photogenic while whining about having their picture taken. well how silly do they look now? just because you believe that you photograph poorly doesn't make it true. a lot of people are extremely photogenic but have never had a proper picture taken of them. when you think about it, each one of us knows what our friends look like better than we know ourselves.

feeling confident? unfortunately i lied. these are the parts of the photograph that you CAN'T mess up. if you practice them enough they'll become second nature, like dribbling a basketball. the tricky part about photography (and basketball) is that it takes more than the fundamentals to do well. how do you get someone to pose well infront of a camera? beats me. i told laura to "hold the beer bottle like you're in a magazine ad" and i just screwed around with my camera in front jacqueline until she started laughing at my incompetence.