SPC Self Portrait Challenge Week #4

I have been trying to challenge myself to step outside of my comfort zone a little and join the Self Portrait Challenge group. This is my first post!

"The challenge for May - is street photography - with YOU in it. Capture yourself somehow, somewhere on the street. With or without others around or others in the photo frame. You could ask someone else to press the shutter for you or carry around your tripod - whatever you do it has to have a ’street photography’ vibe to it. What is that you ask - well Amy Stein says that good street photography should be voyeuristic, immediate, and uncomfortably intimate. It is also often thought to need to be ironic and distanced from its subject matter, concentrating on a single human moment, caught at a decisive or poignant moment"

The whole picture is quite interesting for me to look at because I have been wanting to do these self portrait challenges for awhile and this particular night I decided "I'm doing it!' The girls and hubby were gone and I decided that something I wanted to capture was me out in front of my home walking on the sidewalk. It is a bustling suburban neighborhood of closeknit people so when I pictured myself there alone on the street I visualized myself heading up and out of the neighborhood because there was so much going on below my house and I just wanted to complete this task alone!

Well I went outside, set up my camera and was lining up the shot. One neighbor called out "Hey, that's cheating!" When I set the camera up. Smiling I waved and went about my business, trying to hurry to get this moment I was feeling on film. As I began my trek up the sidewalk with the timer going I hear the snap just as another person going by on a bike stopped.

"Hello!" It was someone my husband had once worked with on his nightly bikeride. Twenty minutes later as he still chatted with me my sweet neighbor two doors down walked up with her little girl in tow, just then my husband and the girls arrived and soon the front yard was filled with neighbors chatting. Women we knew came by with their strollers and children to say hi, cars drove by honking and waving with people we knew.

Almost three hours later I went inside to download my street picture.

Maybe I should have pointed the camera the other way and captured what was behind me....but I prefer this moment of solitude!