It's about their experience
The challenge of photographing people and why I enjoy it
Some of my photographs that I enjoy the most might never be bought by a client and I don’t usually include them in my portfolio, except here (the cute people above, not the old guy at left). They’re candids, outtakes that catch the person in front of my camera in unguarded moments or while they’re acting silly. And my favorites of those are of children, for a couple reasons.
Just looking at the photograph of a smiling, laughing child just makes you feel good. I mean, how can you look a photograph of a kid with a huge grin on her face, enjoying where she is and doing what he’s doing, and not at least break a smile?
Those unguarded moments also tell me that I'm doing my most important job as a photographer: building a relationship with that person in front of my camera, helping them enjoy the experience of being photographed. No matter how skilled I may be with all the technical and creative parts of photography, if I can't quickly build enough of a relationship with that person so that he can relax and enjoy the process of being photographed, the photography will suffer. This is especially true with children, who tend not to mask their true feelings as adults do. If a child hates what's happening, you know it. If it's going well, if she's having fun, you know that, too.
The relationship-building is why I love photographing people as opposed to, say, photographing bugs or landscapes or architecture. The demands are higher (although insect, landscape and architecture photographers might disagree), but for me the rewards are greater.
I know what I've written above is different from the usual About page content for a photographer that as a rule is a biographical sketch like this: I'm married to Lisa, my wife of 41 years, and live in Powder Springs, a small town just west of Atlanta, Georgia. We are the proud parents of two grown daughters and the servants of two demanding cats.
I was the unofficial photographer for my family as a kid, and had my first photographs published in the newspaper for which I was working as a camera-carrying reporter when I was still a young man. I've shot feature photos for magazines, photographed weddings and a little sports, and have used everything from a Polaroid Swinger camera ($19.95 when it was new in the 1960s) to 35-millimeter and medium-format film cameras, and now digital mirrorless cameras.
Though the tools I use have changed, my love of photography remains the same. It's big and humbling challenge; I'll never be as good as I want to be. I'll never make the perfect photograph. But then again, if I did that, I'd have to quit because there'd be nothing left to do. And I still have photos I want to make.