Photo Friday: First Encounters

When I was planning my trip to New York City, my main goals were to spend time with my best friend, and to visit and spend some time with another friend who lives in the city. Along with those goals were plans to drink some coffee, drink a little more beer, and take lots of photographs.

I made lists of places I wanted to visit for photographs and what I wanted to shoot, and, always thinking about ideas for blog posts, I devised ideas for Wordless Wednesday and Photo Friday.

(This is the where you insert the song "Ordinary Day" by Dolores O'Riordan as a soundtrack to this post.)

In addition to visiting sites for photo ops, I thought it might be nice to use my meeting with my New York friend, Miriam, as another opportunity. Something that I might be able to use for Wordless Wednesday.

I was going to use our first encounter as the theme for the photo shoot. Having never met Miriam face-to-face before, I asked her if it would be okay if, while we chatted and got to know each other, I could keep my camera to my face and periodically snap a photo. It would be a session of pseudo-candid shots: not posed, but just natural movements. She would only know I was taking a picture when she heard the camera snap.

The best-laid plans never go as expected. I had a few problems with the shoot. First, the weather didn't cooperate, as dark clouds and rain didn't allow much light to come through the large windows that we sat against. I wanted to use natural lighting, not flash, and so it was difficult to halt movement.

Second, my arms were tired and wouldn't allow me to hold my camera to my face for very long. It was at this point when I realized that after holding onto a steering wheel for seven hours, my muscles were fatigued. So I only held the camera up occasionally, which meant that I lost some opportunities to shoot.

Also, this being our first time together, sitting next to one another, I was a bit nervous, a bit excited, and I wanted to show Miriam that I was paying attention to what she had to say, and not just on how she looked through the lens.

I sorted through the photos that I shot of her that evening, connecting my camera to my iPad and editing the best images with Snapseed. But when I returned home, I ran the raw images through PaintShop Pro. Here are some of those images. Having been shot exactly a week ago, they are truly Friday photos.

After some consideration, I felt that simply showing photos of Miriam for Wordless Wednesday wouldn't do her justice. She isn't merely a beautiful woman: she is funny, lively, intelligent, thoughtful, kind. These photos show her listening, thinking, engaging, laughing, sharing. And I feel that you need to know that about her, rather than just seeing what she looks like.

After all, isn't that what we all want in our friends?

Here's to more encounters.

Happy Friday!