The Importance of the Photograph

My father passed a month ago and today is his birthday.  I'm letting that sink in.  Death is never easy and for those that have lost a parent it has a certain significance.  The person that has been there your entire life is now gone.  There are things that I am now thinking about that hardly, if ever, crossed my mind.  The biggest being that I am mortal and I too will meet the same fate some day, and the other, related to photography, is the importance of the photograph.

I am camera shy.  This has been a fact most of my life.  I believe it is one of the major reasons I took up photography.  I am never in the picture because I am taking the picture.  As a husband and father of two amazing little boys I have to rethink that strategy.  With my fathers passing I realized just how important images of him were to me.  The above image was taken at his 80th birthday party.  It was a wonderfully happy occasion.  All of his children were present and were able to enjoy this moment.  I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time to make this image.  I now have it and will cherish it until I am gone.  It made me think, what do my children have to remember me by?  There are very few images of me.  My wedding and a few random images, my wife made me pose for, are all that I have.  I realized that I want something more for my boys and friends to remember me by.  I want images that reflect me and the things I love, so I now am embarking on a journey to do just that.  I am adding it to my list of personal projects.  

That brings up the question, what do I do with these images after I take them?  I could leave them on a hard drive in the hopes that my family will discover them before they are crushed in the nearest landfill or I could put them in a format that can be passed on for generations.  I am spoiled by the fact that my wife loves to scrapbook.  My goal is to give her printed images every year for inclusion in the books that she creates.  Does this feel a little narcissistic?  Yes!  But it is something that I'm willing to make happen for my family in the hopes that it helps them remember me and the fun that we had.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to set up photo shoots with me as the subject.  My goal is to be more present in the images when the moment strikes.  This may mean bothering the nearest passerby, or whomever happens to be in close proximity, to help.  The goal being to be in the images when they happen.  

In my opinion history is being deleted by the terabyte.  Hard drives are being smashed in landfills, with millions upon millions of images on them.  How many images are left on that little card you insert into your camera that never make it to your computer or the images from your phone that disappear because your phone crashed or you replaced it without backing up the images?  So my goal is to start printing my favorite, and best, images.  In addition to the images for the scrapbook, I will also begin creating Annuals.  By Annuals, I mean a collection of my work from the year, including my best images from each shoot to place in a photo book, marked with the year they were created and background info regarding the shoot.  I'll go into more depth in a future post., but you get the idea.  So when a situation arises, family is gathered, a significant event or just something that warms your heart happens, make the image happen and get in there, your family and friends will be glad you did.  

My Dad, 1944 or 45?  We believe my Grandmother took the image of him in Arizona, Spring Training, Chicago Cubs.  A memory for forever if we make it happen!

How Do Photo's Make You Feel?

How a photo makes you feel is subjective.  We all take photos throughout our lives of special events, where we've travelled, our children, beautiful views and so on and when we look at them they bring back memories and the emotion of that time and place.  These images most probably won't be winning prizes for composition or be showcased on the cover of magazines but they are beautiful to us because they are our memories, our experiences.  But what is it that makes a photo universally amazing?  A photo that when you look at it you can't look away or you have to share it with a friend.  A photo has to make you feel something, happy, sad, angry, aroused.  For it to be great it has to elicit some kind of profound visceral reaction from a broad audience.  This is what I strive for in my photography.  I hope that when I show my images to someone, or they come across them online, that they stop and say this is beautiful or this makes me think or they just want to soak it up.  I know that my photography is  a work in progress and that it will always be.  What I also know is that with each photo I take I get closer to that place, to that emotion.  Every time I take the time to think about what it is that I am seeing through the lens my images get better.  I read a post by Brett Birdsong called "Shoot What Matters" on dedpxl.com and it resonated with me.  He talks about shooting from the heart and not worrying about what shots people say you should get or "what some intoxicated intern behind a desk at a wedding blog tells you that you should see".  I could spend the rest of my life shooting the things that I know will rack up likes or comments in my feeds or I could do something different.  I could shoot what I love and put my heart into each and every image, leaving a little bit of me in each pixel.