At first glance, the title about antique portraits does not seem to fit at all with the photo above of my boy…but it does…at least to me. Not that anybody is actually going to think this photo is antique, but there is some characteristic here that clicked on in my head as soon as I saw this photo on the back of my camera.
I simply must start with the oft quoted Robert Capa: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” Somehow, I think a lot of us already have a feel for the fundamental problem here, but we fix it the wrong way. We want to get closer to our subjects, but we do it by buying longer lenses.
One thing I love about photographs is that normal viewers can feel how close they are to the subject. And I am talking about everyman kind of viewers, not photography educated folk who talk about lens length and depth of field and all that jibberish. There is something really fundamental going on in people here, and we photographers have a chance to touch that gut level feeling.
