100 Strangers #1: David

One of my photographic resolutions (I have a few, but will get onto the others some other time) for 2014 is to complete a '100 Strangers' project. It's pretty self-explanatory but hit the link for more information.

Being in France on holiday and not having enough confidence in the language to approach French strangers, I'd already decided that I probably wouldn't start the challenge til we got home.

Until I saw this chap! I had a reasonable idea he wasn't French as he was wearing a kilt. I took an educated guess that this meant he was Scottish so I stopped him on the promenade and asked if I could take his photo. Turn out he's an actor! His name is David Gant and he was in Braveheart, Brazil, Chaplin, Gandhi and a bunch of other films, and loads of British TV and theatre. He also revealed that he became a model at the age of 56 (he's 71 now and still working -- off to Milan for a job next week).

We chatted for a good few minutes, and it felt like a great start to the 100 Strangers challenge :-)

However, I do need to learn some lessons from the encounter, to benefit the next 99... I had quite a wide (27mm) lens on, not the usual focal length for portraits at all. And I neglected to set my camera appropriately for a portrait -- middling aperture instead of wide open, and left my ISO set at 1600, much higher than I needed for the light, so it came out a bit noisier than I'd like :-( ... so I need to be better prepared next time.

I debated whether to use this head shot or one of the full body shots I did, that would have shown him in his kilt. But in those he wasn't looking at the camera, he was throwing actor/model poses ;-) ... this was the most natural shot and that's why I chose it.

One down, 99 to go!

EDIT: just saw this fella in the new episode of Sherlock!! Nearly spat out my wine! What a coincidence!!