Why do I take photographs?

The first part of Kat's Find Your Eye course, Starting the Journey, gets us to answer the question:  Why do I take photos?  And of course the consideration of "why" really is the basis of everything.  I've spent this morning letting that question float about in my mind and I'm coming up with some thoughts.

First I asked myself how long I've been interested in photography.  And I realized that the impulse to create an image was pretty strong even when I was in elementary school.  My best friend and I drew all the time.  We had sketch books and loved to draw what we saw around us.  I remember trying to draw my cat, and learning how to draw horses, and discovering how to create a drawing that looked three dimensional.  So drawing was my first response.

I graduated from university as a teacher with a specialty in art but life took me in other directions and I've never made the time to really pursue drawing or painting with any kind of focus.  My first husband had a short-term photo hobby, complete with the SLR camera and the darkroom and lots of photography magazines.  I loved those magazines but I wasn't interested in the technical expertise required to achieve those kinds of images.

For many years the camera was something I pulled out at birthday parties or took on a school field trip.  When we traveled I took the point and shoot camera along and really enjoyed capturing the different things we saw.  That was when I began trying to capture a mood or the essence of a place. I took a lot of photographs when we spent a month in Greece in 1987.  Some of them are pretty nice to look at too.  I was captivated by the poppies growing up through the marble columns. But those photos, nice as they were, were just snapshots and the ended up in a box in the back of the closet.

The advent of digital cameras changed all of that.  I love the way this technology allows me to take as many images as I want and then select the best and manipulate from there.  It really engages my interest to take and image and crop it, and increase the contrast or saturation, or reduce highlights to make it come alive. Three years ago we made a long driving trip through the USA and Mexico and I took thousands of photographs.  I photographed markets, waves, villages, walls, flowers, reflections, kids, and everything I saw in the landscape.  I was blogging about my trip and that was another impetus to take lots of photographs and work with them on my laptop to show some of the things we saw on our travels.

Probably what inspired me most on those trips was close ups of tropical plants, wall textures and colours, and old buildings.  My little Lumix served me well for three years until the LCD screen broke this spring.  Now I'm learning about some of the technical details that I avoided all those years ago with my new Canon G12.

But back to the question of why I take photographs.  The easy answer is to record the beauty that I see in my world.  I am a very visual person.  I love colour, line, texture, contrast.  I see these everywhere as I travel through my day.  I appreciate the expressions on my dogs' faces, the sunlight on the bare tree branches, the contrast of the squash soup with the ivory coloured bowl, the sinuous shape of the kelp floating in the ocean, the shadows on the flower petals.   I want to make photographs that evoke the feeling I get when I see these things.  I want to keep a record of these moments.  And perhaps I want to share these with others who might appreciate them, although I think this is secondary.

Too often what I see through my viewfinder though, is not what caught my eye.  I want to develop the technical expertise to do better at capturing what I see.  Often I find that my eye is selective.  I see the mist over the softly coloured fields as I walk along the path.  But when I look through the viewfinder I'm seeing a bunch of ugly branches in the way.  If I were a serious photographer, I'd leave the path and tramp through the mud to the edge of the fence and take the photo I want to.  But I generally just abandon it and walk on.

I guess this is where the internal reasons that Kat talks about come into play.   If it's just a sideline to my life I won't make the effort to get the image I want.  Of course, in the end it's up to me.  By doing this course I'm making a step towards taking myself and my camera more seriously.