1. Alex Bär

Wow. What an experience! Inspired by Skull-a-day, I've been thinking about this project for a while now and today finally had the guts to actually get started. Each day starting today, I will walk up to a perfect stranger, have a conversation with (and about) them and take their portrait. While that sounds simple enough in principle, none of these things come easy to me. Walking up to a perfect stranger? And talking to them? Not something that the Swiss in general and I in particular are very good at... And taking somebody's portrait? Well, while I am very interested in photography, the kindest thing I could say about myself is that I dabble.

So what amazing luck that the very first person I walked up to turned out to be Alex Bär. Alex is an artist - which made my task that much easier, since he was unafraid of stepping into the metaphorical spotlight. I had originally planned to take a series of pictures of my subject, then get to know them better over a hot chocolate in a nearby café, and close with a second series. However, Alex had to catch a bus, so the process was somewhat compressed. I managed to take 12 Pictures, of which 3 are completely unuseable for technical reasons (bad lighting, closed eyes, motion blur). In the course of the remaining 9, I seem to have managed to make Alex feel more and more at ease, and so it is the very last one that I have selected for today's post. I'm still not too happy with the composition, the lighting and the overall quality (the picture is very grainy in high resolution), but I think I managed to capture the amiable depth of Alex's personality.

Things I need to learn:
Talk while taking pictures - I like to keep visual contact in a conversation, which gets a bit awkward when I'm trying to look through the camera at the same time.
Get a better eye for composition and lighting.

I would like to express my thanks to Alex, whose friendly cooperation helped me make the first step - and direct you all to his website, where you can see some of his beautiful paintings.

Please leave encouragement, tips and criticism in the comments,
thanks, h.