Jeff Gee

Jeff Gee

This is a photo of my good friend Jefferson Gee. He was my roommate freshman year, and we've managed to keep in touch since then, though we don't see each other as often as we'd like. Each time we do, it seems like an endless stream of good conversation. He's just one of those guys you click with, you know?

Well one place we did get to see each other was in Europe. Last summer, while I was in Oxford, Jeff was studying all summer at the Georgia Tech campus in France ("GT Lorraine"). We decided to take one weekend and meet up--in Switzerland. We thought it was wild that two kids, one from New Jersey and one from Alabama, could go to school together in Georgia, and then manage to meet up in Zürich. Fun times.

While we were bumming around Zürich, he would ask me questions about my camera gear and photography. I took this photo to demonstrate the difference between a wide-angle, close up shot and a shot with a long lens from further away (which quickly followed). I wanted to show him why the long lenses are preferred for portraits, but I ended up liking this photograph better. Sure, the telephoto shot captured his features more accurately, but I feel like this one better captures his personality: fun to be around, a little goofy at times.

See, the significance here is that you won't find a "HowTo" article on the Internet telling you to take portraits with wide lenses, and rarely will you find that advice in books. All the "rules" say portraits should be taken with long to normal-perspective lenses. And, if I had just been taking the shot without trying to demonstrate anything, I probably would have put on a 80 or 100 mm lens, backed up and composed, and captured his features well. But because I was prompted by Jeff to experiment--even though I already knew what the result would be technically--I discovered a new result aesthetically. It seems I need to be asking myself the question, "Well what would happen if ...?" a bit more.