What is the Purpose of Photography
Sunset at Disney World, 1997. My photography skills have come a long way since then, as well as camera technology.
Photography has been a hobby of mine for many years. It started in my high school years with my little Kodak 110 camera. My first “real” camera was a Minolta X700 I bought from a pawn shop one summer. I was doing an internship in the Dallas, TX, area and had met a guy there who was a professional photographer. He went with me and helped me pick out the camera, and we drove around the Dallas area, taking pictures of the skyline and whatever else looked interesting. From that day on, I was hooked.
I am a nurse case manager by day, and my professional creative endeavors have taken me through audio engineering, video production, and almost anything I could get related to live theater and concerts. I enjoy photography and travel, and I usually keep my camera close by almost everywhere I go. Over the years, my cameras have changed, and my image collection has grown. At the first of the year, I decided to start going through my photo collection. I discovered I had well over 50,000 digital images, not including my boxes of photographs from my film cameras and my boxes of video tapes (8mm and mini DV tapes… over 300 tapes). As I was sorting through the photos, I began to ask myself the question, “What is the purpose of photography?”
The act of capturing the image or the video is a very fun experience. I love the challenge of getting a great image and going off the beaten path to capture an image that most people will never see. And they never will as long as that image remains on my hard drive and never gets shared with anyone. The purpose of photography is to capture an image of a place, person, or event… a moment in time and space, and to share that image with other people. What good is the most amazing photo in the world if nobody ever sees it?
I cleaned out my photos and deleted about half of them. Do I need 30 photos of my 1-year-old staring at the camera, and why on earth did I save all those out-of-focus pictures?) Now that I have them all in one place, mostly, and backed up, what’s next? I started sharing some of them on Instagram and Facebook, and that was good, but I have decided to create this site and start sharing them here.
A good photo tells a story. I love to use my imagination and create a story around the photos I see, but I also enjoy hearing the photographer tell the real story behind the photo. Sometimes, the photo is the story, but other times, there is a great story behind capturing that image. So… I hope you enjoy as I begin this new journey with you and begin to share some of the over 30,000 images that I have and the new images I continue to capture. Don’t worry. Most of those original 50,000 images are great memories, but not worth sharing here.