When someone compliments me on my photography by saying what a nice camera I have, I immediately reply in my head,
“It’s like telling me my stove makes good food.”
I bristle when people say photography is just being in the right place at the right time.
Many photography snobs whine about Instagram and Twitter and iPhone cameras and the accessibility of photography to the world.
But I refuse to complain about the explosion of photo sharing sites and applications that make photography every man’s hobby. I wouldn’t be a true photographer and lover of beauty if I did.
I am a photographer first and foremost because I love this world and the beauty around me.
I believe beauty exists in the little, everyday moments that are easily overlooked.
I can capture this with my camera, but so can others with their camera phones and Instagram feeds. Many of us don’t personally care about the latte art that gets posted to Facebook, but a photographer’s image of a cup of coffee can bring a viewer to stop and look again.
The difference between these, I believe, is an eye that only photographers have.
Few iPhone photographers claim to be the real deal. Even if they don’t recognize it in themselves, they probably love color or shapes or symmetry and are drawn to recording it.
Those of us who claim to be real photographers can’t begrudge this of the world.
I want the world to see beauty—through my photographs, and then eventually through their own eyes that can learn to see everything around them.
Sometimes, sharing beauty through photographs is not about the quality of the photographs, and it isn’t about the perfection of the composition.
It is about capturing the sunlight coming through a window or the complimentary colors on a plate of food and sharing it so that others may learn to stop and see beauty.
