The purpose of my portraiture project was to show how I saw my subjects, and the sides of their personalities I felt were most prevalent. I also wanted to give them freedom within the boundary I set of certain, obvious, personality traits. I chose 4 subjects in total, my girlfriend Marlene, my friends Juli and Brandt, and my 1-year-old brother Jax. I have known Marlene for about 4 years, both Juli and Brandt I have known since August of last year. For some photos, I told my subjects exactly what I wanted, and let them execute that vision. For the remainder of the photos, I gave them liberty over how to act, and decided to focus on the frame instead of the subject themselves. The portraits gave me a much closer look at what the relationship should be in any future portraits I take, which would be one of pure documentation. Through the course of the project, I found that everyone reacted differently to being a subject. Marlene and Brandt, for the most part, really enjoyed being photographed. Whereas Juli found it awkward and claimed that she is not photogenic. It was also interesting to see how they reacted to my opinion of their personalities, feeling sometimes that I, or the photo I wanted, represented them in a way they agreed with and other times they didn’t agree with. Through mostly pure documentation, I found that I had the most fun, and the most success, when I let them act out and be themselves instead of trying to shine a light on parts of them I felt were important.