The second day we were in France, Tina and I did a little self-timed photo shoot in the apartment we rented while we waited for Luis V and Becky F to show.
We posted this image to Facebook and Instagram yesterday, and it did well with likes and comments.
One comment was, “Wondering what Jeremy is thinking at the time the shutter went off.”
I was thinking about looking “natural” while trying to make sure light was hitting my face. Tina blocked it in a few other shots, which is easy to do.
There are actually a few shadows on our faces that I had to airbrush out.
But you’d be surprised how much work actors have to do to make sure they aren’t blocking their co-actor’s faces. Often when two people face each other, the two people aren’t directly in front of each other. They are staggered.
It was more obvious in older movies, but I suggest integrating looking for the ways actors do this in the next movie you watch. It’s a fun game.
Le Café Wittypoots 
Since working on my first feature film set two years ago, I am always on the lookout for ways that actors have been directed to “cheat the light” in movies. I’m with you. How do these people focus on performing when they have been explicitly instructed not to move their head a millimeter past such-and-such a mark because doing so will make certain that either themselves or their costars are completely obliterated in the unlit space of the shot???? And some still say movie stars have easy lives . . .
That’s exactly what I’m talking about.
There are amazing scenes in movies where the light dictates exactly how the actor needs to be looking. So they have to deliver line after line with their nose angled ever so perfectly.
Between that, and many other factors, people don’t realize how much work it is.
I like the photo – especially your use of available light. My only suggestion would be to consider cropping the bottom at your shoetop, because with the foot so much closer to the camera, it appears disproportionately large.
It’s nice to see what bloggers actually look like. :.)
Thanks, Stan.
I agree with you about the crop, although I would recommend knees up. My legs would still show enough distortion to make it appear weird. Shooting with a wide angle lens, I shouldn’t have had the legs in at all. The distortion/perspective is hard to wrap the mind around.
I gave this crop a lot of thought, and ended up erring on the side of showing the rug to give it even more sense of place, since the method of laying down rugs like that on hardwood is soooo very French.
I settled on the idea that we weren’t going to get this shot with anything but a wide. A higher focal length would have provided more compression and less awkward, but there just wasn’t space.
And sometimes it’s the things that mess with the mind that makes a viewer linger longer. And in this era of throw-away photography, I find that sometimes causing a stay-and-look phenomenon is somehow beneficial.
This is way too long of a response not to make me feel like I’m guilty of something worse, like the inability to take professional photos. 🙂