Life is not complicated. It’s precise.
We can only be in one place at a time, travel in one direction while moving, account for only our last action, and witness only a single event in time.
Unless you’re a photographer, transforming these restrictions, compressing into a two-dimensional space the most recent set of experiences of the life around you.
You wait for the light to change. It might be minutes, hours or days. All you want is that precise moment when your observations and expectations meet, where the chaos around you becomes the order you require.
You measure the rhythms, the patterns of movement, observing, anticipating the solitary location along the thread of motion surrounding you where the elements you require to tell your story merge into 1/500th of a second at f4.
You talk quietly to your subject, moving them into the place, position, mood you require to complete the construction of your next frame.
You move, forward, backward, side to side, kneel, exploring perspective and placement for your position on the adjacent thread.
As these fundamental elements merge into a cohesive collection, endorphins introduce themselves into your consciousness pulling you toward an apogee of pleasure recorded in your camera.
Your photo is not just a two-dimensional representation of a moment. It is a physical expression of the pleasurable success of your examination of the world around you. It is your exhibition of the seemingly complicated movement around your life. It is the precise telling of a moment of order in the chaos.
Finding the order in the chaos is every photographer’s duty.
