Environmental Portraits

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I think normally one would expect the environmental portrait with the less familiar person to be more of an awkward situation. I'm not sure that was the case with my set of environmental portraits. I think I felt about equally awkward with both subjects. While Dr. Krueger is one of my professors this semester, I'd never actually spoken to him individually (nor had I read up on all of his accomplishments in his field) previously. Shooting him involved slight awkwardness; for some reason I feel compelled to converse with my subjects while shooting portraits, either for their comfort or my own. In terms of the portrait itself, his office was the perfect environment, from just about any angle.
Photographing my friend Holly involved a different nervousness. I think I had more concern for how I was portraying her because of our familiarity. When I might have expected more eye contact in photos with the person more familiar to me, the reverse was true here. Dr. Krueger had a tendency to meet the camera with his eyes though I hadn't asked him to do so or not.
The environment in Dr. Krueger's portraits also showed more his profession and fields of study, whereas I feel Holly's reflected more so her personality as well as her interests. There was a kind of quiet elusive quality to her photographs, especially when I decided to focus on the bookshelf items in the foreground rather than her directly.
In terms of captioning, Dr. Krueger's ended up being more lengthy because of his accomplishments, and because I felt the items in his office needed identification for the audience to understand their significance. Holly's portraits I felt stood on their own better in this way, and relied more visually on communicating the portrait information rather than on the text.