Why I like Photography

I've always enjoyed taking pictures (I think most people do), but until today, I couldn't really articulate why. Of course it's fun to take the photos, and fun to look at them after -- but why exactly?

I played squash today with Eduardo and Karl, and as I was watching them play, I thought to myself that I should bring my camera next week and get some great action shots. Then I thought that perhaps I should bring my video camera. But that just didn't seem like it would be as much fun. I don't think I'd ever plug in the video camera and watch the video of Karl and Eduardo playing squash -- but I most definately would look at the pictures again...somtime. There's something fun about catching the action, and freezing it in a photo.

I've heard my father (who at one time was a semi-professional photgrapher) say, that a photograph "freezes a moment in time". I recently heard a proffessional wedding photographer say that there is no such thing as a perfect picture, only a perfect moment.

It occured to me that perhaps why I would rather capture a squash game in a still photo rather than a moving picture (and subsequently why I like still photography more than I like video) is because when I look at a photo my mind re-creates the moment in the way that I want it to be created, not necessarily how the moment actually took place. In other words, though the reality of the precise moment that the photo captured has forever vanished, when I look at that moment on film (ie: a picture), my brain re-creates that moment in whatever way it so chooses. It makes up what it wants to see. It embelishes.

A video doesn't allow any room for embelishment. You simply sit back and relive a segment of time exactly how it happend. Your brain doesn't embelish -- it just sits there and recieves what it's been given. No fun.