Saturday, September 19, 2009

Vincent de Groot

Check out the street and portrait photography of Vincent de Groot, made during his travels - some very nice work. Perhaps we can encourgage him to write about how he approaches all these fascinating people.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, if you like these, I'd be very happy to tell you about how I approached those people in India.

Photo-Vinc said...

George,

Let me try to explain:

The portraits are a relative new experience for me, it all started in Mali where I took
these portraits of an old man and his son.

I did not speak French, my wife was the one talking but it was a nice moment. After this I lost my natural shyness and asked (with hands and camera) to take portraits. I continued this “technique” in India and in Europe. It all deals with overcoming shyness when you see an interesting person.

Normally I just make one photo, just one shot, one single moment after that the moment is gone.

When I take more than one photo… in nine out of ten cases the first one is the best. The best however does not mean automatically a “keeper”, lots of photo’s are deleted.

Working in Mali was natural, people where happy being photographed without posing too much. In India people are expressive, they know the medium… they know how they want to look. To me my work of India is less natural.

After India the next trip was Cuba, I took lots of time thinking what to do. I made a list of what to capture, this list was guiding me during the 3 weeks there. I started to move to street photography with an occasionally portrait. Those portraits where taken after a longer conversation, another approach than Mali. Concerning Cuba, I feel very quite about the street photography but there still are things to learn.

Shortly after Cuba I visited Syria, a wonderful country with wonderful people and great moments. Till now I did not start working on the work from Syria, soon it will appear on my website.

Vinc