Sometimes making a picture just doesn’t work. This image is what I would have posted of a very nice girl named Courtney if I could have. She’s a student downtown and was kind enough to agree to be a subject for my Portrait 52 project when asked on a street in downtown Vancouver. I introduced myself, gave her a business card to prove that I wasn’t just a random crazy person with a camera (I was a random crazy person with a camera and a business card), and chatted briefly to explain what I was doing and what was going on.

I shot a few frames of her sitting in front of the school, and she explained she didn’t have that much time, as she was being picked up soon. No problem, of course, and I snapped a couple. She asked to see the back of the camera and I showed the shots to her.

At this point she got a bit… “twitchy”. I honestly don’t know if she didn’t like the picture, or didn’t like that it would be online (she asked again what they were being used for). She muttered something about having an agent and he might not like it, and that she’d been at an acting class crying and didn’t look her best. Being a super-intuitive type of person I realized at this point that she was bailing and even my charming personality wasn’t going to save this. I asked if she just wanted to forget it and back out, and she said yes.

Sometimes it just doesn’t work. Sometimes (especially in an unplanned environment) your subjects are going to be twitchy, scared, or just plain freaked out at having a camera pointed at them. That’s ok. Be respectful. Be polite. Delete the pictures if asked, and respect their wishes. Simple as that.

It sucks sometimes, I think a couple of the shots I got of Courtney were really good, but she didn’t want the images taken in the end, so I’ll live with it, figure out how to have as magnetic a personality as Brandon from Humans of New York and go back and ask another person, and another, and another.