My photography project: Asking strangers to participate

🇯🇵 [こんにちは] is a normal daytime greeting, but not usually the first thing you'd say when stopping a stranger for a favor. In this situation, people more often start with [すみません] to get attention politely.

🇯🇵 This is the standard polite opener when approaching a stranger: it can mean "excuse me," "sorry," or even a light "thanks," depending on the moment. For stopping someone on the street, it sounds much more natural than opening with [こんにちは].

💬 Put [の] between two nouns and the first one describes the second: [しゃしんのプロジェクト] = "photo project." You can reuse this pattern with almost any noun pair, like [日本の会社] ("a Japanese company").

💬 [しています] is [して] + [います], often used for something you're currently doing: [勉強しています] = "I'm studying." With [をしています], the [を] marks the thing you're doing, as in [しごとをしています] ("I'm working").