I am passionate about telling a story – about communicating an experience through words and images, both still and moving. In fact, I truly believe that most of life’s most precious moments simply vanish and slip away because we didn’t engage them, didn’t embrace them, or simply took them for granted.
A Happier Time - Valencia, Ca 2008
So I thought about it. Thought about communicating the process leading to the richest moments of our life. How can I effectively communicate the process behind the still? How can I communicate the complete story without the need to have been there? What are the tools available to me to do it?
One of the tools (and for me the point of departure) is photography. I love photography. It’s a passion. It conveys emotion, time and place, climate. It is a powerful tool. As I look back at highlights in my portfolio, however, I find myself wanting to more clearly remember the moments before and after the shutter was clicked. I find myself wanting to more clearly remember the moments leading up to the exposure, the moments spent talking to people before and after you shoot them, and the feeling when you know that you have a great shot in the can.
The Crowd: Ambrosia in Concert - Valencia, CA 2008
More often than not, a shooting day is filled with moments of frustration. Either the light is in the wrong place, or you’re the wrong place to capture it. Missed moments due to inability to pull focus. Missed moments because you weren’t ready. For the landscape photographer, image hunts (especially in Arizona) are riddled with spontaneous storms, excessive heat and dehydration. Add about more than 30lbs of gear and even the slightest grade starts to feel like Everest. Still, that process is the memory to a larger degree than the frame in the camera. The process is what lives and breathes.
Montezuma's Castle - Arizona
It is the process that ultimately interests me the most. Getting there. Checking the radar. Beating the weather. Anticipating cloud movements and breaks. Anticipating crowd movements. Anticipating the highlights of the show. Climbing. Observing. Hiking, wading, waiting and riding. Being there when the sun lights up the desert for about 30 magical seconds before it starts its descent below the horizon. It is the process that adds infinite value to “image”. Those are the moments. That is the journey. This summer, I’ll set out to capture that journey in multiple mediums and compile them together to tell new stories. The stories behind the images. The stories that give photographs their value. Stay tuned.
2 Comments
That is a HAPPY clown!
He was pretty deep in thought. I think he was considering a career change.