Happy Sunday! This week, on Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #263, John from Journeys With Johnbo is challenging us with faces.

Portraiture is one of those things I don’t often explore on my blog or in life. I don’t really get much of a chance to practice taking portraits because no one in the family share my love for photography and each time they want me to take their photo, it’s either for an ID or passport or they want me to cram so much landscape into the photo that the person would end up being a dot in the center of the photo. Apparently, that’s how they like it.

It’s not how I like it. I enjoy close-ups. Let the photo be about me, not what’s around me, no matter how breathtakingly it is. Let my emotions clearly reflect on what I was feeling at the moment. Like this dog I captured at this year’s 4th of July parade, he was just a face in a crowd of parade-goers and I made the subject of this photo.

When I get the chance, I love to challenge myself to photograph things I rarely or never photographed like this dangerous knives juggling act I watch in Hunan, China. I sat on the only open seat – the seat closest to the performer. I had no idea what I was doing as I had only started playing with this mirrorless camera 2 months before.

It was always just a point and shoot camera. There were no messing around with aperture and ISO and speed. I watched this man’s juggling act through the camera, clicking away, and praying at least one of the photos would come out right. Well, I got two. Did I mention this man was in this seventies?

Finally, this is Hong Kong Park, taken in 2018. My aunt and I spent a day in Hong Kong because mom requested I get a new pair of prescription glasses. I didn’t even know I needed one. I have one good eye and a bad one. I often get the suggestion from optometrists that I should wear a monocle but that would look stupid on me or anyone, right?

Anyway, we had to spend the day in Hong Kong to wait for the glasses. Same-day glasses plus exam only cost me $55 USD. In the US, my annual eye exam is in the $500 range and that’s not including glasses.

So we wandered over to see Victoria Peak with a detour through Hong Kong Park. It was lunch time when we went and found people strolling, eating, and even catching a quick snooze in the park. I can never sleep in the afternoon and am often impressed how people can just drop everything and take a nap in the middle of the day.

For a park, the amount of people coming and going is much more than the amount of people I see in my neighborhood park. Maybe because this Hong Kong, one of the largest metropolitan cities in the world, while my neighborhood park is just it – a small park in the residential suburbia of northern Utah.