Friday, July 24th, 2015
Yu Xoaopeng – Master Portrait Painter
I walked with some shots left in my analog camera thru Times Square NYC. It was close to midnight when I saw Yu Xoaopeng drawing a portrait of a beautiful woman. I stopped and was amazed by his skills, a second guy was standing beside me and we both talked about his amazing talent. In this moment it was clear for me, that I want to do a portrait of him, so I waited until he finished the girl and asked him. He didn’t speak much English, but his friends helped me to translate. It was pretty dark already at the Times Square and with ASA 1600 I had to shoot 1/5th of a second with my bare hands at F2.8 manual focus. I did two shots and this is the one I liked much more. I would have liked to make the photo a little brighter, but half a second exposure would be nearly impossible without a mono pod.
As you can see, I did not crop the scan from the negative, because I liked this kind of framing for his portrait.
After I did the pictures, he wanted to draw a portrait of me. In the first moment I disagreed, but after a minute it came to my mind that this is a one time chance to get a great portrait done. So I went immediately back to him and told him that I changed my mind. He drew already another guy, but after that he started to draw me. It was already very late and the worker started to clean the streets of New York. Everybody was gone, just Yu Xoaopeng and myself were sitting there. Trucks were backing up into our direction with a loud BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP, workers where cleaning around us and lots of other stuff where going on (I heard water splashing behind me). But we did not move an inch, it was like we were frozen in time and nothing could disturb us. I had the feeling we were sitting there like that for about 30 to 60 minutes.
After he finished the drawing, I realized that the truck and workers were just waiting for us to get their job done.
What a great moment that was.
Happy I changed my mind and happy I was able to experience being drawn from him.
www.street-portraits.eu/
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