From my photoblog…but decided to post it over here too.

I just got finished a weekend workshop with amazing child photographer Skye Hardwick and as part of the workshop we had to write an essay answering the question "Why are you are photographer?"  Here is my answer.

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Why am I a photographer?   Good question.

For most of my life I assumed that I was just not a creative person.  I was surrounded by creative people, yearned for a little of that magic myself, but thought that I just didn’t have it in me.  Sure, I had my writing, but until recently, I didn’t consider the exercise of stringing words together a creative process.  Therapy, maybe – but not creativity.  In fact, it wasn’t until my love affair with photography that I realized that my writing is also art – because I go to the exact same place when I write as I do when creating photographs.

I have always been obsessed with holding on to memories.  My own brain has a fairly limited ability to retain details, so my life is a series of diaries and photo albums and memory boxes – all collected in an attempt to hang on to the specifics of my life. 

That is where it started. 

I wanted to capture memories, and because I believe that anything really worth doing is worth doing well – I wanted to be good at it.  So I got my camera and I set out to learn to be good at it.   Strangely enough, it wasn’t quite as easy as I imagined.  The road from there to here was a bumpy one, filled with months of self-doubt and thousands upon thousands of mediocre pictures.  More than once I was tempted to give up and toss my camera in the garbage.

Then somehow, after my shutter had clicked what seemed like a million times, things started to slide into place.  I started seeing something in my images and - wonder of wonders - it seemed that other people did too.  Instead of just capturing technically acceptable portraits – I was starting to really *see* potential images all around me.  Suddenly, art was everywhere, even when I wasn’t behind the camera.  Colours took on new qualities; light danced, shadows whispered, scenes called out to be frozen in time.  There was nothing in my life that was not a photograph waiting to be taken.  Nothing.

My computer darkroom went from being a necessary evil, perhaps even bordering on cheating, to being part of my artistic expression.  I learned to harness Photoshop to enhance my vision of what my work could and should be.  Curves and levels and masks and textures used to make a fleeting fragment of time sing forever in the form of a photograph. When I’m deep at work on an image, I feel a buzz…a high that is unlike anything else.   I lose myself and find myself in the magic of taking an image from raw potential to final creation.  When I get to that place where I feel the image becoming what it was meant to be, time disappears and it is almost as if the image itself takes over – because there is a point were both artist and art become one.

This creative process has taught me to think less, and do more.  To rely on instincts and personal style and what my eyes and heart tell me, and to worry less about focus and perfection and the directions from some forum or expert or book.  To develop my internal style based on what feels right to me in the moment, because the very best art has to intensely personal and deeply experienced by the artist, otherwise it has no soul – and art with no soul cannot be received.

And so slowly I realized that this was my work, my passion, my calling, my creativity.  This entire process, from beginning to end, this was my art. 

In the process of just wanting to be good at something, I learned something far more important.  I discovered that I had art inside me after all. 

Why am I a photographer, you ask?  How could I not be?