Why Do We Photograph? A Top 25 List!

With the turn of another new year I thought I’d look back on the past 12 months and offer up a bit of what goes through my head when I photograph. And why I do it.

In today’s world, where anyone holding a smartphone is now a ‘photographer’ and every subject has been photographed endlessly and there really isn’t any way that you can compete with the millions of images that exist of every subject, you might ask, why photograph at all?

If I choose a general subject – say - birds in flight, or mountain photos, I can see on Google and elsewhere that there are millions of examples of photos that would out-compete my images on all levels. There’s simply no way I can get the best photos of anything – no way I can get complete coverage of all seasons or weather in a place. No way I can capture all stages of an animal’s life, no matter how remote or ‘uncommon’ it might be. The reality is that there will always be another time when someone else is ‘in position’ with an image-taking-device when the light or the situation is better than when I happened to be there.

So why bother you ask? My answer is simply that I do it for the love of it. I do it because I love to stand at the edge of the lake in the crisp morning air or to sit and watch birds feeding or flying by. I love to share such moments with Anya or with clients who wish to learn something from me, or those who simply want to share such moments with other like-minded souls. I love to capture memories so they can be re-lived and I love having the chance to see something new that I haven’t gotten in my photographs before. No matter how many times I’ve been to say, the Canadian Rockies, I still love standing at the edge of a lake there and waiting for the sun to rise, just in case it might make the clouds glow a bit differently this time or because the reflected mountain might be perfect this time or because I think, maybe an ethereal layer of fog might show up today. It’s not complicated at all, this love I feel and for me it’s wonderfully ideal.

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