Portraits

This weekend my family visited Melvín - a friend of ours who works as a trainer on a fancy horse farm down in the Mad River Valley. I figured this would be a good opportunity go get some pictures of people - both because it's a beautiful place, but also because it's interested to see people at their work.

With Melvín there's added political resonance since he's an undocumented worker from Nicaragua. I think a lot of folks in Vermont don't know that much about undocumented immigrants in our state and I wanted to take the opportunity to show him as a real person, not just a statistic or political point.

In terms of my photographic progress, there were some posed photos (The picture of my son Zeke by himself on the pony), but I mainly just followed around Melvín and Zeke taking lots of pictures. Looking back at the pictures, the thing I wish I had payed more attention to at the time was some of the mid-range backgrounds - I was concentrating on capturing moments in the foreground with good scenery in the background, but sometimes thing in the mid-range (fences, trees, etc.) were distracting and I didn't notice them at the time.