There is no simple answer to why I love photography. What can be captured in a picture goes well beyond what could ever be captured with words. While aiming through the viewfinder and searching for the perfect angle, the perfect flicker of light, and the perfect smile, grimace, scream, or flock of hair, there is a sense of calmness and peace that comes over me. It's as if nothing else exists beyond the reach of my zoom button.
The best types of photographs are those that come unrehearsed, unscheduled, and without prompting. It's the moment when my little sister leans forward in her beautiful white dress and catches the lips of her new husband for the first time as a wife. It's the moment my little girl takes the stage for her very first dance recital, only to kick her tap shoes into the stage and throws a screaming, crying fit of anxiety.
Photography Tips
Then you have the softer moments of nature that seem to be happening just for my entertainment. For instance, the bee slipping out of a newly opened flower like a lover rushing home in the morning dew or the multitude of birds that flock to the trees in my front yard all summer long.
From rare moments of humanity to everyday encounters with the wild, everything can be captured forever by photography. Things that would otherwise go unnoticed get drawn into the light and focused on until they are seen and admired around the world.
What would otherwise happen in one moment and be gone the next is forever captured and held tight by photography! What better thing in the world is there to love?
I believe that people who love photography have a certain passion and curiosity for life. They are not content to let the smallest, most mundane things that occur in the world go unnoticed. They are excited at the mere thought of discovering the unknown and getting up close and personal with every aspect of this world.
A lot of my photography would never interest anyone else in the world, but every now and then I will take a picture that stops me cold. It tends to be the pictures that show something that occurred in the flicker of a fraction of a second that I would have never even recognized if it weren't for the magically timed flash of the camera.
In these pictures I often see a glimmer in someone's eye that tells me they are not happy or a smile so deniably gleeful and exhilarated that the happiness of that moment has touched that person forever. These tend to be raw, un-posed pictures snapped at random moments when the subjects and myself least expect anything profound to be revealed.
Right there in those moments, that is why I love photography! It's not so much in the thrill and fun of snapping the pictures but in the off guard moments when some very real, stark honest reflection of humanity comes out of my camera and is born forever into the world.
Why I Love Photography
No comments:
Post a Comment