Perfect Truth and Perfect Lie

Ever since I took a month off to reflect on my photography in March 2010, I’ve been trying to answer one very specific question: What do I want to shoot? 

It seems like a basic question, but after eight months, I still don’t have a succinct answer. I appreciate the time and effort that goes into designing a building and architecture consequently gets a lot of attention from me. I love to watch people as they interact with the world around them and especially as they interact with other people, so people and street certainly gets a good share of attention (admittedly, I don’t make those shots so readily available for public viewing). I have a long-standing fascination with geometry and patterns in nature and the resulting abstractions would certainly get more photographic attention if I wasn’t so busy admiring them all the time. I love my state (that’s Texas, not Massachusetts) and country and I certainly love to shoot the things that remind me of either- flags, memorials, monuments- they all get some attention. (In fact, I have a library of over 1500 photographs of the United States flag alone, but that’s on my hard drive, not flickr.)

So the easy subjects to list are architecture, people, patterns, and anything that reminds me of my state and country. There’s one more subject that I enjoy shooting, but it’s not so easy to categorize and name. In short, it’s “those things everyone else doesn’t seem to see.”

It’s the things that everyone either doesn’t see or sees and ignores- the little things that make a big impact, the look in a person’s eye when they see someone do something genuinely good and true, the smile only a mother can give her child. These are the things I really enjoy shooting, but these moments are so few and far between that I often desire to become a part of the moment more than I desire to record the moment, so there aren’t as many photos of those things- those short moments. This is why I often walk slow and talk fast, why I live to shoot.