Voice

What does this mean?

Does any of it matter?

What am I doing with my life?

These are questions that I'm sure most people have asked themselves at one point or another. It always comes at different times, but ever since I started down this road I have found myself asking more of these questions.

Why do I do this?

Sometimes I just feel uninspired. Sometimes I hate the photos I take. I ask myself questions like "Are these any good?" "What is good anyway?" I look at pictures I've taken in the past and I think "This is crap" or "This is uninspired..."

The question that's at the head of my thoughts... that I think of after almost every photo is "What am I saying with this?"

Photos, after all, are meant to be shared. No one who does this is content creating image after image only to keep them in some super secret hidden library. No one chooses this path in hopes that no one will ever see their work. So what I find myself wondering is what exactly it is i'm trying to say with my photos. With the usual work I do (weddings, events, et all) they aren't exactly complicated messages.

"She's happy."
"He's nervous."
"These people are having fun."
"This father is proud."
And so on and so forth.

Where am I?

Are they just moments in time? Places I've been? People I know?  Is it a memory? Are they hopes?

Ideas? 

Dreams?

Are they life?

I'm not one to complain, and I shouldn't either. I'm very fortunate that I get to subsist by doing something that I love. Sometimes though I feel like that love gets lost. I feel like I get distracted. There's this shiny veneer coating that says what I do is glamorous...and sometimes it's really not. I get content keeping my bills paid. I'm comfortable being able to afford certain luxuries for myself, for my dog, and for my girlfriend.


And yet...sometimes I'll look at my photos and think "These are empty, hollow, meaningless."

Where am I going?

Don't get me wrong. I don't have some grandiose view of what I do. I won't cure cancer with photography. That's a job for someone that...well for someone that's researching cancer cures. There may never be any great books or collections made from my work. It won't start a revolution. What I'm doing will probably not have any major impact on the world. In spite of everything I see, no, everything that I know is wrong with the world... I can't fix it with photography. I think about that, and it's depressing.

But you know what?

I look over my body of work so far and I do see something. I see a perspective. Is it unique? That I can't say for sure. Is it good? I'll leave that up to others to decide/worry about.

What I do know for sure about it is this: It is me.

Capturing a Duet.

The Warriors' Duet

 This shoot turned out exactly as I imagined it would. Sometimes you'll go into a shoot with something specific in mind and end up discovering something completely different. It's good to be open to that sort of process because rigidity is bad for creatives.

It's best to be fluid to get where you need to be.

This time however, I knew how I wanted this to look and ,with a little bit of direction, I was able to get it in less time than any of us had planned for.  When my dear friend Katie asked if I had time to come grab a couple of shots at the rehearsal for a play my friends’ company was producing for the San Diego Fringe Festival I knew that I didn't want them to look like just plain shots of a rehearsal space. How to go about that was a bit of a mystery initially... I don’t like going into shoots blind so I read the press release for the piece, and a single word stuck with me. “Enchanting” is how they described a relationship the story showcases . I knew that the photos had to reflect that

Form.

So I chose a single overhead light-source from a giant diffuser as my tool and went to work. I watched the piece once to get an idea of where the actors would be and to keep an eye out for any movements or moments that would be particularly striking in this light. After that I set up my light-source and took some snaps of a second run-through. The images were good...but not great. They were missing a certain punch.  So I asked the actors if they could play the whole thing tighter and just get directly under the light as much as possible while still being true to the movement of the piece. The resulting images, even just looking on the back of the camera, were exactly as I imagined them.

I didn't want the viewer to be distracted by the objects in the background, so I really needed the light to make these wonderful actors jump right out of the image. It's always a pleasure to work with people who know how to take direction...which is why i'll never turn down a shoot with actual actors involved :)

Ain't Nobody Got Time For That

I'm fighting what I like to call "work comfort." It's that point you reach where you job is enough to provide you with essentials: food, roof, entertainment... but the amount of time I spend there cuts into energy usually reserved for heading out into the world to do what I love to do. Make photos. The past week has been even heavier. As I type this I'm getting ready to go in for my 7th day of work in a row. There are open hours in the day, sure, but I've been feeling pretty strapped for free time lately.

Ok so maybe I have some spare time...

Thankfully, I have a very understanding girlfriend. The lady is happy to take a bit of our time together and use it to satisfy my need for little photo adventures. Just the other night we took a quick detour into downtown San Diego so I could get a shot I had been thinking about for the better part of a week.

Worth it.

I let my last full time job completely sap my energy for photography. It may have been because I felt dirty for shilling crappy souvenir prints to people who didn't really want/need them. It may have been the commute when the job was far away. It may have been the added responsibility of being management. In any event I let it pretty much kill my creativity.

I won't let that happen again.

What I've Learned

....Not how to hit a curve ball, not literally anyway.

This one is a lot less photoey (photo eee? photoish?) than...well than all my other posts. When it comes to photography I've got more than just a few things to talk about. On the other hand I kind of feel like talking about myself today. The great thing about me (stay with me here) is that when I'm 84 years old I'll be able to look back on my 20's and say, "I was such an idiot, but at least i grew out of it." While i'm saying that, I'll be bopping my head to some 90's alternative... waxing poetic about how awesome it was when hoverboards came out in 2015.

In my early 20's I had some pretty serious self confidence issues. 

I didn't always kick this much ass while doing the Carlton.

Why? Hell if I know. I've always had a lot of friends, and at that point I hadn't been without a girlfriend for more than a few months at a time. I suppose at some point in everyone's life self doubt manages to creep in. With me though it was more like being hit by a bus. 

I think a lot of it had to do with still feeling more than just a little bit lost.

Not the awesome road trip kind of lost either...

I did a great job of pretending to be fine (something that I still hate to say I'm good at) so I doubt anyone noticed. I was listless. I had a job that I didn't loathe (though that would change rapidly) and a girl that I loved (again, that would also change) so I didn't think I had any legitimate reason to complain.

Then I (cliche I know) discovered myself.

Somewhere around the time this was taken actually.

I think photography had a lot to do with it. Something about taking photos and sharing them with people felt...cathartic. It's like saying "This is me. This is how I see it." without hiding anything. Sharing little pieces of your world with others, or something like that. In any event, it fostered a lot of growth in how I interacted with people and the world around me. It also grabbed my attention like nothing else had before. It gave me the confidence I needed to take myself where I wanted to go.

It was the first time I knew what I wanted to do with my life and I was 24.

When I meet people who are on their way out of college that express worry over their future I tell them this. That it wasn't even until I was well out of college (over a year) that I really had any interest in a particular path. It was some time after that where I even entertained the thought that it would actually work...and even more time after that before I started to pursue it relentlessly. And now here I am, a 30 year old who knows without any shadow of a doubt my place in the world. I'm meant to explore it, to explore people, to share what I see with everyone.

Must. Go. Places

I've got a good job. I've got the girl. I've got a passion that drives me. Life is pretty damn good.