Look Around You

Nikon D40
35mm, f/5.6, 1/400 sec, ISO 200

People, especially family, often ask me why I took up photography. Why do I enjoy it so much? The simple answer is that I enjoy it. It gives me a sense of peace.

There is so much beauty around us; the lotus that grows through the sludge, the mechanical perfection of a Bugatti Veyron, the love that drives a stranger to save a child from an oncoming bus, a picture perfect sunset. The justice of having a perfect season only to lose in the championship game, the justice of requiring the world’s largest machine to find the world’s tiniest particle. A walk along a river, a drive down a country road. The roar of a fighter jet, the rumble of a muscle car. The innocence in a child’s smile, the serenity in a  grandmother’s eye. Duct tape and WD-40. The spark of a fresh idea in the mind, the constant beating of the heart. A movie script ending, a long novel. The grip of a tire on asphalt, a perfect gear fitting. A moving ballad, a striking riff. The colors, smells, and tastes of nature. The hug of a stranger, the idea that you may have changed someone’s life. Fifty thousand people coming together to stop an unknown stranger from jumping off a bridge.

I know I’m not the best photographer to ever walk the planet. I don’t try to be. I do try to capture as much of the beauty around me as I can. I think we photographers sometimes get caught up too much in the hairiness of the technicalities- aperture, ISO, shutter speed, composition, exposure, focal length, tripods, strobes, sharpness, contrast, color, et cetera, et cetera. A perfect image isn’t technical. A perfect photograph is a moment.

People like to think of a photograph as capturing a point in time. And that’s just not true. Since 1967, a second has been defined as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the Caesium 133 atom" (13th General Conference on Weights and Measures). Thats over 9 billion periods. After doing some statistics on my flickr uploads, I’ve found the mode shutter speed to be 1/125 seconds. That’s 73,541,054.2 periods of radiation. 0.008 seconds is not a point in time at all. It’s 73 million times the length of time of a dainty atom’s radiation. That’s a moment.

I photograph to capture a moment, I photograph because I have to believe that there is beauty around us. We just have to look. Like Dan is in the photograph. I can’t prove it, but I have to believe that he’s pausing to take a look at the lotuses on the riverside.

Take a look around. See something beautiful. It’s there, I promise you.