Zamami People Project - Old People

The Zamami People Project (working title?) is still coming along, albeit slower than I'd hoped.  We've had a very wet spring, which has canceled many outdoor shoots.  I am over halfway through the total shots I want to get (~40-50) and some of them cannot be shot until we get the beautiful May weather and turquoise colors in the ocean, but I think the mid-week evenings are going to be crowded with as many miscellaneous shoots as I can fit in.

Three of my four shoots for this week have been canceled, but fortunately one of the most important shoots of the whole project happened today without a hitch.  I'm hoping to get black-and-white portraits of most of the old people from Zamami, so I coordinated with their weekly Wednesday luncheons and set up a mini portrait studio next to a window and cycled through the ten elderly folks who showed up.

I had a lot of helpful support from the staff who work with the old people, which seems to be a theme throughout the project.  Although I struggle a little to explain what the project is about (in Japanese), most everybody has been very generous with their time and scheduling to accommodate a shoot for me.  There has been much less "I don't want my picture taken" than I was expecting.

The evolution of the project is interesting.  I started off with a bang doing the firedancing shot last fall, but recently many of the shots I've taken are more "documentary" than creative challenges.  There will hopefully be 5-10 'stand out' images during the show, but there are far more shots that I can't really figure out how to make interesting beyond having the subjects dress in nice clothes and try to smile in front of a not-ugly backdrop.

I have a lot of processing to do to get through all the 'old people' shots, but here is an example of the effect I'm trying to achieve: