The photo above is a picture of my best friend, Odyssey, who's been my friend since we were in the fourth grade. Even as all our other friends drifted away or went to different schools, we stayed together, and they're one of the most important people to me. We've basically done everything together that we can, and this trimester has been hard because I don't have any classes with them. To get this shot of them, I posed them next to a tree and told them inappropriate jokes to get them to laugh. Luckily, it was a really nice day when went out, and the leaves of the tree provided really good lighting for the picture. I also used a specific lens on my phone that blurs the background and focuses on the person or object in center frame, so it makes it look very professional.
While taking these portraits, I struggled a lot with finding enough people close to me to take pictures of, whether because I just didn't have access to them because of time or distance constraints, or because of the issue of social distancing from my friends. With Odyssey, we were both vaccinated and we took the pictures while outside, which limits the exposure, and everyone else I'm related to and live with. To make up for the lack of people to take pictures of, I had to take two photos of my pets. One of them, my cat, Amy-Katherine, was pretty easy to take, as she was just waking up and she doesn't move around a lot. However, with my other photo, as picture of my ferret, Esther, it was a bit harder because she was smaller and it was hard to take a picture of her with a neutral background and she's not flipping around all over the place (she's very energetic), and so I had my mom physically hold her still while I took the picture, and even with that, her hand showed up in the background, so I had to blur it quite a bit. Overall, I still think it's a pretty good picture, but it was a bit of a hassle.