AKA Richard.
Richard’s public moniker is Nutnfancy. He has a YouTube channel called The Nutnfancy Project which he’s been running for years. The channel is a gear review channel in which he reviews various things from backpacks to watches, knives, camping gear and firearms. He’s amassed nearly 750,000 subscribers.
I met him at some protests/counter protests at the State Capitol several days ago. Richard was on the counter protest side of the issue. When I saw him addressing the crowd with his bullhorn I knew that I wanted to ask him for a Stranger photo.
When I went to approach him he was filming the crowd with his camera and I waited for him to take a break then approached him. I held out my hand, introduced myself and told him about what I was wanting to do. He was pretty cautious at first.
“Are you with the media?”
“No,” I said. “I’m just a guy taking pics.”
He still wasn’t quite convinced. “What’s your political stance?” He asked. “Are you pro 2A?”
To the average person it may sound odd that he’s so cautious, but when you’re a somewhat public face like he is I think it’s understandable.
After a few moments I convinced him that I didn’t have an ax to grind and he lightened up a lot. In fact he became very friendly and agreed to let me take some photos.
Again, like the previous photos I took at this event, the background was a real challenge. He understood it, too, as I asked him to move a bit to position him. I finally positioned him so that we were parallel to a wall which seemed to be about as good as it was going to get under the circumstances.
I snapped a few frames; some close up head and shoulders and some further away. I liked this one the best because it encompassed some of the environment and crowd but wasn’t overpowered by it.
After I finished taking the pics we talked for a few short minutes about various things; history, government; high level things like that. I wanted to ask him so much more, but I knew that he was there with his camera, too, and wanted to get back to his work.
Technical stuff: ISO 100, 50mm, f2.0, 1/320.
I knew that his hat was going to be a problem with darkness over his eyes so I exposed as far to the right as possible without the building in the background blowing out (ETTR when shooting raw is your friend in these kinds of circumstances) and then pulled it down just over a stop in post (-1.2 in Lightroom). I took a number of photos with various degrees of ETTR and this one was just perfect. SOOC, it was pretty bright, but I was still able to maintain the details.
Before going out to shoot pics at this event I made the conscious decision to go with my 50mm. Up until I took this pic I was really regretting it as most of the pics I had taken up to this point had been head and shoulders/close up shots. The 50mm is not really a good focal length for that kind of portrait shooting because of the perspective distortion that always has to be contended with at short distances. However, for this shot, the 50mm was near perfect. We were both standing on a ledge and I backed up as far as I could for this frame. If I were using the 85 I wouldn’t have been able to get this half body shot showing his bullhorn.