Portraits Taken and Lessons Learned

I recently had another opportunity to take portraits of several well-known people.  If you’ve been following my blog for any length of time, you know that I prefer to take landscape images and photograph the natural beauty that surrounds us.  I’ve never had a mountain say that my picture made its behind seem too big!

Once again, I threw caution to the wind and took some portraits of some pretty high-powered people.  One of the things that I learned was that they usually aren’t the same people that we seen on the movie screen or at the political rally or in the sports arena.  Most of them are just the same as you and I, but they’ve excelled in areas that we haven’t.  Or put another way, we’ve excelled in areas that they haven’t.  Who’s done what is strictly based on your point of view.

Some were just as fascinated with what I did as I was with what they did.  Others were, to be polite, self-absorbed jerks who need an entourage to make themselves feel superior to others.  Okay, maybe that was a little harsh, but you get my point.  Oh, for the record, that’s not to say that people who’ve excelled in other areas aren’t just as big a jerk as the few I meant recently.

Lest you get the wrong idea, the majority were good, decent, hard-working people.  To be sure, they had their people, but they also had the same fears, concerns, and worries that most of us share.

What’s the point of all this?  Simple.  If you have the opportunity and take advantage of it to look behind the public persona, you’ll quite often see someone with the same foibles we have.  You’ll find someone who can be terribly insecure when pushed out of his comfort zone.  Most people can relate to that.

In most cases, you’ll also find that, after all is said and done, they’re just people.  They want their kids to have a better life than they did.  They want their parents to know that they raised their children well.  They want to be able to say that they left things a bit better than they found them.  In short, they’re a lot like us, with a tad more fame, fortune, or status.

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As always, thanks for your continued support!