Strangers

To give myself a challenge and to get shooting images more regularly I have decided to try and assign myself a few projects. I have an interest in people as a subject for my photography but I can sometimes have a hard time finding models for images, I'd also like a project that will push me out of my comfort zone and increase my confident in shooting images of strangers.

For this I have taken inspiration from the '100 strangers' website and flickr pool.

'One Hundred Strangers project is a learning group for people who want to improve the social and technical skills needed for taking portraits of strangers and telling their stories. The method is learning by doing.'

The project sounds that it will be perfect for my targets mentioned earlier, as well ass increasing the range of the variety of people within my images different ages, styles, hair colour etc. I also have had a few additional ideas for shooting

• To shoot using an instant camera.
• To shoot hands and a handshake.

The idea using the instant camera could be completed with a camera such as an Instax mini from Fuji 

The camera prints out images roughly the size of a credit card, I could also bring a pen suitable for writing on the images for the subject to write something about them and their name underneath the picture, they could do this whilst waiting for the picture to develop and I could talk and get to know them before showing them the picture. The main concern of this would be the price of the film cartridges for 100 images.

The second idea consists of two images in a diptych, first I would take a portrait image of the person followed by a handshake with them, a gesture of introduction. The images would be similar to the typical '100 strangers' project with a twist, a celebration of a first meeting.

I'd like to present the images in a way similar to above, the black being the image of the stranger, the grey being the image of a handshake.