Everyone seems to be a photographer these days. Everybody owns a phone or a camera of some quality so they can snap pictures of the greatest moments of their lives to prove they happened.
Over the past two years I have been doing the same thing. With either my phone or a cheap film camera I've been "screenshotting" my life. I've been determined to do exactly that. I despise staged photographs because I prefer to capture life as it happens. Life in its natural state is amazing and worthy of photographing. A friend of mine who also uses a film camera was talking to me about the finite nature of shooting in film. There are only so many exposures on a roll, and unlike SD cards, you can't just snap away. Closing the shutter like a machine gun feed will only consume space on the film strip and limit how many things you can photograph. My fellow film enthusiast believes everything is worth the film, but sadly we don't have infinite exposures. So we can only expose our favorite things about life. I agree with her.
In these past two years, my photography has almost always been candid. Much to the dismay of some of my subjects. I've photographed models, singers, my friends and strangers. The most common complaint is something like: "Take it again, I wasn't ready!" Well, that was the point.
Truly beautiful things don't ask for attention, or strain to be more beautiful. In "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," a world-renowned photographer and explorer spends a year of his life searching for a reclusive mountain leopard. When he finally finds it, he chooses to observe it with his naked eye rather than take the shot.
I'm also notorious for taking the photo a few counts before I said I would. My girlfriend is quickly catching on to this tactic, but I will find a new way to catch her unprepared. Unprepared beauty is so much more valuable than any other kind because it's so rare. There is nothing more beautiful than a person whose flaws are vulnerable; it's magnetic. Photography (especially un-staged photography) catches those moments when people aren't trying to look like someone else's kind of beautiful. I am not immune to this perfectionist tendency. I hate pictures of myself sometimes because they don't match with the image I have in my head. I try to act like and look like other people sometimes when I don't like who I am, and it's not healthy. People always try to make themselves look good for the photo, but God made them beautiful at the start. So why should you try to be beautiful, if God's already done it the moment you were born? Even though re-takes are expensive and space is limited, everyone is worth the film. Because anything made by God is beautiful without needing to try.
