Extreme portraiture

I'm in a reflective mood today, photographically speaking.

If any of you have been paying attention to my photographs and looking closely at them and thinking about them, you may have noticed a few things:

1 - Many of my photographs don't have "a subject". Yesterday's shot is a good example: for me, it has 5 subjects, the woman with the red nail varnish at bottom left; the guy in the dark suit; the woman with the dark clothing at the right of the frame; the railing in the foreground and the lamp post in the middle. I can identify those as "subjects" because they are elements I was aware of as I pressed the shutter. There are also various additional points of interest, such as the guy who is apparently coming out of the top of the head of the woman on the right, which I wasn't aware of when I took the shot but which I now see and like. So that picture has at least 5 or 6 subjects. Which leads me to wonder: at what point can a photograph cease to have any subject(s) at all?

2 - I can occasionally go "conceptual", as with this shot, which is a picture of two people who aren't there.

3 - There is a preponderance of "sneaky shots". The point of these shots is not that they are "sneaky": the "sneakiness" is simply a prerequisite of what I'm trying to do. Friday's shot is a good example. I wanted to get a shot from a low, close angle, but if I had stopped and crouched and raised the camera to look at the screen, the guy would have noticed what I was doing and the scene I wanted to photograph would have been gone.

4 - I like unusual angles. See point 3 above.

5 - I tend to work with the edges of the frame. This is instinctive but not deliberate, by which I mean that I don't think "I'll put that at the edge of the frame" when I'm composing a shot, rather I compose a shot (usually very quickly) in a way which instinctively "looks good" and this often results in an important element of the shot being at the edge of the frame or in a corner.

6 - Often I don't "compose" at all, at least not with the screen or the viewfinder - I have a rough idea of where to point the camera and I rely on luck to do the rest :-)

7 - I don't work in genres. Except for "street shot", if that's a genre. I don't really understand genres, where they begin and end. At what point does a portrait, for example, cease to be a portrait?

If you have noticed all of the above in my photographs, please award yourself a virtual prize :-) Actually, if you have read this far, I think you deserve a virtual prize...

So what does all this have to do with today's blip? Simple - I like this shot because it incorporates a bit of each of the things I've mentioned above. It strikes me as a kind of "extreme portraiture"... an extreme candid portrait of the woman who appears as a sliver at the left hand edge of the frame.

Today's alternative is slightly less radical.

Today was OK for a Monday, although my mind has clearly been going somewhere it doesn't often go :-)