I captured this portrait of Ali while I was in downtown Atlanta shooting for one of my clients recently. No, I wasn’t being paid to capture portraits of random people on the street – not like this at least. But, the opportunity presented itself, so I took it. Ali was standing outside the entrance to Five Points Marta station when he caught my eye. He wasn’t doing anything except standing there with his cane as people passed by. So, I approached him and ask if I could do a portrait since he was so interesting looking. He accepted. My request seemed to have made his day.

His English wasn’t so good, so it was a bit tough to communicate with him. But,  from what I could tell, he was standing there, not saying a word to anybody, waiting for somebody to come up and give him money for a ride on Marta. I turned out to be that person. I didn’t give him actual money, but I did walk over to the machine that you buy Marta passes from and bought him a card with five dollars worth of rides on it. He seemed to be as appreciative of that as he did my interest in photographing him.

I love photographing and connecting with totally random people like this.