Details

When I shoot portraits, I'm usually drawn to a person's overall presence and I pay limited attention to the details.

Here's an example of reveling in details after the fact:

This is a portrait of Magali Pozo, a twenty-four year-old who lives in Larreynaga, Nicaragua. Although I carefully composed the picture so that she would be framed in the doorway, I didn't really see the lovely interplay of shapes and textures such as the buttons on her blouse and the nailheads on the door, or how the split of the ponytail into two parts is repeated in the slits at the bottom of her blouse and is further repeated in the vertical lines of the pleats in her skirt. The textures on the right side of the image add interest, as well.

The most interesting detail for me, however, is something I totally missed at the time I made her portrait. In an environment where women work at demanding, physical labors every day, it's unusual for anyone to have such perfectly shaped and manicured fingernails.