Picture Notes

Speeding? In a hurry, or is it just a camera trick?

Faster and faster until we don’t take the time to be here and now and the road becomes green and fuzzy because we are moving so fast through the blur of life we are out of control looking for something we can never find.

The blur of life is rarely a theme in books or movies. Unless I photograph people and things I can’t really remember them, my past goes missing, it’s been my problem forever. So as I speed along I have to stop every now and then and snap.

I see this every day, twice, for the past 3 years as I commute to Washington, DC by metro. It’s always a race down the highway and sometimes the metro train wins.

Scouring the web for photographs

I’ve been out there, scouring the web for photographs to write about and finding the same stuff, there doesn’t seem to be much new out there so I’ll only use my own work. Most of the photojournalists seem to be corporate shooters, but that might be because I work in Washington, DC - same talking heads, same podium, just a different face.

When I photograph people speaking at the podium I’m usually locked down and trying to make the picture when they pause and their mouth isn’t moving or when they don’t have a funny expression, it’s kind of dull and tedious. It’s fun to photograph people with odd expressions but most of the time it’s just taking a cheap shot.

Often I look at photographs and wonder what was going through the photographer’s mind when he took that photograph. I’ve spent so much time doing commercial work that when I snap the shutter I’m usually trying to emphasize a particular graphic element, a color, or I’m thinking about how the photograph is going to look on the page.