This hobby has made me see the world is ways I never thought I could; what was once a sand castle turned into a sweeping landscape, what was once a massive mountain became “the background.” In the case of this shot, boats became a quick shot while I was out with the family. In this post I will talk about how I do photography when I don’t intend to do photography and what a typical “photo shoot” looks like for me.

       The key to these kinds of shots is not the planning or the location, but rather my ability to slow down time to a single frame. A majority of the time my mental process includes a lot of questions about the value of the image before I even turn on the camera. In cases like these boats, I was out with the family for a nice dinner with friends at an…aptly priced restaurant. The bay next to our dining locale was full of many different shapes and sizes of sail boats, but these stood out to me because they were out of the water; silly boats, that’s not where they go! But their tri-color sails and slim bodies impressed me, so much so that I whipped out the camera, took some time to get the exposure time right, and snapped the shot. It’s one of those photos that I almost forgot I took, and had to save from Editing Ben and his nack for deleting.

       And that’s the conflict of it all for me, what shots do I take? How do I stop the world spinning for long enough that it will matter? I have told myself many times that things (and other non-physical entities) only have the value we assign to them. I feel this is true for many of the arts as well. Often we are too caught up in the “it’s not like the old masters” -ness of it all that we forget that the most beautiful things in the world are only those which we, the individual, find beautiful. I can take a picture that I don’t really know what to do with (like this one) and think it’s not the best, but someone else may find it intriguing and exciting.

       Ultimately, any evaluation I make of my own art will be one of comparison, either to others who have taken similar images, or to the object as my eyes saw it, or to some unrealistic idea of how the image should have turned out.

On a more practical note, I have a bunch of new pictures edited and ready to post, I just need to write these small essays to go along with them. So until I get those posted, enjoy the small (and large) beauties around you and I’ll talk with you soon. -Ben