This week, Tina from Travels and Trifles leads Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #205 and she has chosen to focus on the eyes this week.

For as long as I can remember, I have trouble looking into people’s eyes. My step-father used to say in a stern tone, “Look me in the eye.” I thought it might had been my lack of confidence but the thing was every time I tried to look him in the eyes, I felt like one eye was fighting with the other eye.

It was like I had an eye-patch over my left eye and it’s trying hard to peek through the eye patch. It was so frustrating.

I found out recently my left eye is a lazy eye. If you ask me to see with just my left eye, I would be blind as a bat. No matter whether I wear glasses or monocle, I can’t see. My right eye, on the other hand, has perfect vision and it’s so perfect that it’s carrying the weight of my left eye on its tiny shoulders. So with both of my eyes, I can see 20/20.

So I’m not good at portraits and photographing someone’s eyes is part of portrait photography, I think. Maybe it’s because of my eyes. Maybe it’s because I never get to practice. I’m camera shy and most of time, if I’m taking a picture for a family member, they’d want large landscape, tiny person sort of picture, which isn’t what I’d call a portrait.

My idea of a portrait is to get up and personal, whether by zoom or by literally going up to the person and shoving a camera in their faces. It’s like what people say, “the eyes are windows to a person’s soul.”

I hope I get to practice taking people’s portrait one of these days. I would love to get up and personal, especially with photographing the eyes. It’s been fascinating to me, just looking at pictures of people’s eyes. The eye is such an unique body part, don’t you think? I guess, until I get that opportunity, I’ll just practice on animals and unanimated objects