Biffle Shoot + A little rambling + a picture or two

When our 2011 Spring Break was coming to a close we decided to head out to the beach one last time in order to document not just a trip, but a friendship. Typically I have to make funny faces, lame jokes, or just act crazy in order to get my subjects to loosen up to allow their true personalities to come out, but these two were much different. Maybe it was due to the fact that I had been sticking my camera in their faces constantly for the past few days.

As a photographer, you would think that I would know the value or the significance of a single photograph. A split second in time. But for quite awhile, I lost that mindset and had taken many of the photographs and the times in my life for granted. Maybe it was laziness, but I always seemed to use the excuse, "I don't feel like lugging my camera around." (Im thinking about picking up a Black Rapid Strap to alleviate that). After the recent tsunamis and earth quakes in Japan and throughout the world, I've seen countless amounts of photographs from the aftermath. And those photos, along with this trip, have made me more aware than ever of the amazing value a single photograph can contain.

I was shown a Facebook post from Ashley, one of the young ladies in the photos below, from a photographer that went something along the lines of "so you can make a photo black and white/over exposed/add vignette in post/over saturate/take a picture with something out of focus, and you think you're a photographer". It really got me thinking about my photographic "style", if I even have one. It made me ask myself whether the images I was creating were only appealing because of the editing is post, or due to the emotion that the image evoked out of the viewer. I've looked at the work of many of the great photographers that came before me, many that shot film, and I am just amazed. With film, theres no photoshop, there is only the raw image. And yes, you could make the argument that film has a larger dynamic range than the digital sensors in todays cameras, but still. The emotion that the photographs create along with the emotion the photograph captures is simply amazing. And that, to me, is what seperates a photograph apart from just a picture.

Now, I'm not saying all photographers should omit photoshop/lightroom/aperture from their digital workflow, but I am going to make a conscious effort to create emotion evoking photographs rather than just snap-shots with fancy editing techniques.