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Sunday Traveler: Troy Floyd - Portraits Around The World

2012-02-04 07:00
This is a Guest Post by Troy Floyd of www.foggOdyssey.com. I had been following Troy 8217;s website for a while and finally got a chance to meet him in New York last year. My weakest area as a photographer has always been taking photographs of people, which is exactly what Troy has excelled in. His portrait shots of people from around the world are absolutely stunning. I ask him to do a guest post of his best portrait work and provide some background behind each image. You can find him on Facebook and Twitter Gary recently asked me if I would do a guest-post on his website featuring portraits I have taken while traveling the last few years. To be honest, I only started focusing my photography on people this last year because I got tired of taking the typical tourist shots of the places I visited. I started to get bored and felt like I really couldn 8217;t do justice to the Eiffel Tower in Paris that someone else hadn 8217;t already done. I mean seriously what new angle was I going to find that someone else hadn 8217;t done 100x already at the Taj Mahal I wanted to do something different in my photos/travels and portraits of people has been that outlet for me. I, like most people, am self-taught and everything I learned was either from trail-and-error or from reading about other peoples work that I liked. I constantly try and reach out to other photographers, asking questions or seeing if I can spend a day with them photographing. This is how I learned the technically stuff I needed to get better with my camera. One of the single best things I did was learn how to use Adobe Lightroom to edit my photos in post-processing. It brought my photography up 3 levels just by doing that! Recently this last year I started using off camera flash to capture my portraits but one can easily use natural light for portraits when traveling and get great results as well. The single BIGGEST question I get about my work with people is How do you get people to pose for your photos I wish I had a magic formula for it but I don 8217;t. My response to most is I just ask them if I can take their photo, it 8217;s really that simple for me and I think that is what most people don 8217;t do. I know it 8217;s not easy asking a stranger for something, especially when you might not speak the same language but the only real way your ever going to get people photos is by asking. Once you get over your fear, then the creativity can start! Other travelers tell me all the time that the one thing they wished they 8217;d taken more of when traveling are photos of people. When I ask them why they didn 8217;t, most respond, Because I 8217;m always to scared to ask! Below are 20 photos that I have taken in the last few years during my travels. 1 starts when I didn 8217;t know much and it finishes with 20 where I am currently at in Medellin, Colombia. If you are the type who wants to do more portraits of people in your travels but lack the confidence to do so then maybe the below exampl...
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