strangers

Perhaps you’ve been through this scenario. You see an interesting subject doing something truly unique, you hesitate and sometimes miss the shot altogether. When you do gather enough courage, your heart races, your palms get sweaty, and a quiver can be heard in your voice as you nervously ask if you can take a person’s picture. Sounds familiar? It can be discouraging if you miss the opportunity and the shot.

British photographer Chris Porsz tirelessly tracked down local people he photographed roughly 40 years ago and recreated his decades-old street photos of them. The fascinating then-and-now photos are part of his ongoing series Reunions.

NYC-based photographer Dani Diamond took a V-Flat and his portrait skills out to the Jersey Shore and shot fashion photos of complete strangers he ran into. You can see the project and results in this 6.5-minute video by AdoramaTV.

For my project "The World I See," I have gone to 19 countries in the last 12 months and walked up to strangers to ask for their photograph. In the beginning, I was just walking up to people, getting their photographs, and then walking away.

As a street photographer, I like catching those quiet moments of solitude people have amidst the busy and hectic life of the metropolis. That's how my Daydreamers series was born. While combing through my archives and Instagram posts, I noticed I had a lot of photos of people with their eyes shut.

Photographers Jessica Kobeissi, Rachel Gulotta, and Daniel Inskeep decided to approach strangers in downtown Los Angeles and offer free portraits. The 11-minute video above shows what happened.

For their ongoing "Craigslist Encounters," the Los Angeles-based photography team Kremer Johnson has been shooting portraits of completely strangers who are each found using Craigslist. Each subject responded to an ad titled "Characters Wanted" and agreed to pose for $20 an hour.

In this 4-minute video by Wex Photographic, street photographer Matt Higgs takes up the challenge of capturing 30 street portraits of complete strangers in just 2 hours.

Street photography can seem daunting. The idea of photographing strangers and intruding on their privacy might make you nervous, but this video by Eduardo Goye is full of tips for how to overcome this.

Starting about 40 years ago, photographer Chris Porsz began shooting street portraits of strangers he met in his hometown of Peterborough in England. For the past few years, Porsz has been tracking down those subjects and asking them to pose for recreations of those decades-old photos. The ambitious project is titled Reunions.

Actor JD Walsh recently created a Hollywood-style movie trailer... featuring strangers he encountered on the street.

Editors like to say, "There are great pictures to be made right in your own backyard!"

Come to think of it, there really is a lot going on in my backyard, or at least in my Baltimore back alley. Fugitives from justice have fled down my alley, pursued by police helicopters. I once found a trail of blood that stretched for hundreds of yards. I followed it the whole way, and at the end found a guy with a badly cut hand sitting on a curb.

Street photographers Chuck Jines and Keenan Hastings both uploaded videos this week showing confrontations they had while shooting on the street -- Jines in New Orleans and Hastings in Detroit. They both came across strangers who didn't appreciate their photo being made, but Jines and Hastings had two very different ways of dealing with the situation.

Sheep Meadow in New York City's Central Park is a popular spot for sleeping and sunbathing, sometimes drawing tens of thousands of people per day. For his project "Sheep Meadow: Vertical Abstracts," photographer Michael Massaia shot candid portraits of people who are deep in sleep, creating surreal images of intertwined human bodies suspended in darkness.

The Grocery Store Project is an unusual and ambitious effort by Danish photographer Simon Hoegsberg. After spending 159 afternoons over 20 months shooting 97,000 photos of strangers near a supermarket in Copenhagen, Hoegsberg set out to find brief and hidden connections by analyzing the images.

On Saturday, April 11, 2015, I stood on Valencia Street in San Francisco for 12 hours and offered free portraits to anyone that passed by. I'll share a little about what the experience was like.

For his project "Comfort Zone," Lithuanian photographer Tadao Cern visited a public beach and shot photographs of the people sleeping comfortably on the sandy beach. The images were not staged, and none of the subjects were aware that a photograph was being made.

Photographer Tom Johnson recently partnered up with stylist Phoebe Haines for a project titled The Thirty Three. The team roamed the streets of London for five days, asking thirty three random strangers to put on haute couture (i.e. "high fashion") clothing and pose for portraits.

I visit San Francisco often to walk the streets with camera in hand, hoping to capture life as it happens. Invariably I am asked for change and/or a cigarette. For the most part I try to be generous, but as a non-smoker I’m not able to oblige. I then wondered what would happen if the situation was reversed: instead of being asked for a cigarette I would offer them to random people from all walks of life.

Have you ever wondered what you life would be like if you ended up with one of your exes? Or just a random person on the street, somebody whose trajectory in life would have changed your own drastically?

Czech photographer Dita Pepe has, but she took it an step further than most of us when she turned these spousal what-ifs into a series of portraits that take an interesting look at "what might have been" had her family life taken a different direction.

Photographer Pelle Cass is fond of composites. The set of so-called 'single frame time-lapses' he put together for his Selected People series has gone quite viral.

But his fondness for composite photography doesn't stop at creating overcrowded scenes, he applied the same approach to taking portraits, creating a bizarre (and perhaps a little unsettling) series of portraits called Strangers in the process.

Photographer Richard Renaldi's 6-year-long project Touching Strangers has been an incredible success. From viral Internet fame to a full-fledged photo book that exceeded its Kickstarter goal eight times over, there's something profoundly moving about complete strangers posed together, sometimes quite intimately, on the streets of NYC.

In the video above we get a behind the scenes look at how Renaldi does what he does, and how his subjects, sometimes reticent at first, often wind up feeling at ease and connected to this perfect stranger they didn't know existed 10 minutes ago.

Have you ever covertly taken a photo of an attractive stranger when out and about in public? If you have, then you're no different than 8% of Brits, at least according to a recent survey.

While photographer Richard Renadli was in the midst of his 2003 project, See America By Bus, where he was photographing groupings of strangers waiting in Greyhound bus stations, he began to think about exploring the idea of expanding on his group portraitures of strangers concept.  “To create spontaneous and fleeting relationships between complete strangers,” as he as stated.

Pay a visit to photographer Jamie Diamond's website, and you'll find that one of her projects is a series of family portraits. The images look like standard family portraits: the members are posed in different places and positions, there are older members and younger members; everyone's dressed nicely, everyone's smiling.

Look a little closer though, and you might notice that certain things are a bit strange... or should we say "stranger"?

NYC-based photographer Joy Mckinney has spent most of her life conforming to the norms she believed to be "socially correct." Her latest series, The Guardian, is about breaking through those norms and her own socially guarded personality in order to interact with strangers on the streets of New York in a real and meaningful way.

Photographing strangers can be a daunting proposition. It was one of the focuses of the workshops I held in NYC this past summer. What if they get mad, what if they yell at me, or what if they go completely psycho on me? Odds are, most people will simply say no pictures. Even the school of Bruce Gilden photographers have hardly been bothered with their “mugging style portrait.”