For a while now I've been trying to articulate how much I enjoy being able to capture emotional moments as well as artists expressing themselves. I haven't been quite able to say what I want to say, but I'm getting closer.
While I was stuck out to sea last month with nothing to do but edit some images I hadn't gotten to yet as well as go through and rework some older shoots for stock submission, I realized that for me it was all about loving my subject. I can't put it any other way. What got me back into photography after a long hiatus was love, wanting to capture and record my new family. That expanded to wanting to capture my circus family. What I finally saw while working my images is that in some way I love all my subjects. If there is no love, the shot just doesn't work. No matter how much time I spend in photoshop, it won't get there. But when I'm loving the subject, and the subject is loving what they are doing, it's magical. The images shoot themselves and the editing is easy. After debating a lot about how much to "photoshop" an image, I realized that all I am trying to do is make the final image match what I saw when I clicked the shutter. Anything less than that feels incomplete, anything more feel overdone. I'm not able to always get it yet, but that's the goal.
I've had a few exchanges with people on Facebook that go something like this:
-wow, you made me look so beautiful/awesome/etc...
-no, you looked like that already, all I did was click the shutter.
When I think of photographers I admire, one of the common threads that links them is that they capture beauty in unexpected places, not just the typical hot model types, but the old weathered souls and faces. Everyone is beautiful, the art and talent lies in being able to not only see it, but to capture it in a way that lets others see it.
Wrapping all this together in my head it finally started to click, to come into focus, (see, back to my roots of bad camera puns,) whether I am shooting performers, posing models, getting portraits, anything, what I want to do is make the people I am shooting able to see themselves as I see them, and I wouldn't be shooting them if they weren't beautiful. What I want to do, whether it's a sunset, a supermodel or a homeless junkie on the street, is to be able to find the beauty that is there and to record and reveal it to the world.
Still working the final semantics, but my mission statement and motto is going to be something along the lines of:
"Happy Dragon Photography, Let me show you how beautiful you have always been"
That isn't quiteitI though. That's where I invite your help o faithful readers. Just can't nail it down. I don't want to say "how beautiful you can be," because it implies you aren't already beautiful or somehow need work. Maybe just "how beautiful you are."
This is raw (as opposed to JPEG) pretty much stream of consciousness, just figured I'll throw it out and see what feedback I get since I have some pretty smart and literate friends who cans put things into words better than I can. So what do you think?
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