Obviously, though, who am I to disappoint you guys?

Behold--a real post!

Or at least a semblance of one, anyway. I'll post something cooler in the future. (And I think it might actually be time to start afresh, actually!)

Lately I've been thinking about the role of photography in my life. Last year, I took the plunge and picked up a used Canon 10D digital SLR. Which, to me, is about as awesome as you can get with cameras. It does everything--super fast sports snapshots, insane rapid fire to capture the perfect moment, enough battery power to let me indulge in my fun little night photography outings, and a whole lot more that I haven't tapped into yet.

I spent $700 USD on it. A bargain, considering that it lists for $1500, but it's still the most I've spent on a toy for myself since my dear Taylor guitar. And yes, it's allowed me to do some really cool things. I have yet to take it out to Yosemite or some other grand venue...maybe I'll get to do that over Thanksgiving break. But it has, however, been the host for a few portrait sessions that I've done for friends at graduation.

Those portrait sessions are a lot of fun. I take my dear friends down to the main quad, dress them up in their cap and gown, and proceed to play the role of the eccentric oddball that I do so well. I make them laugh, I make them relax, I take 50 millon shots of them without them realizing that they're standing in front of a camera. I throw away 90% of those (thank you digital for making this feasible!), and the 10% that I keep are the ones where my friends look the most natural and at ease (and in which I haven't screwed up the focus or the lighting :P ).

And so because of those sessions, somewhere in Anaheim and somewhere in Colorado, there are prints of my work that presumably have been framed and put amongst the other mementos that define a family and its history.

It's a wonderful feeling to know that I've done that...that I didn't have to do any fancy editing, airbrushing or whatever to make people look beautiful. All I had to do was take a photograph correctly. That doing so allows their natural beauty to come out, and not get messed up by odd camera angles or distortions or whatnot. It's just a photograph. A momentary capture of the likenesses of remarkable people in my life and in others'.

It makes me wonder what it'd be like if I were to go one step further and capture them in actual moments...to not just document who they are, but catch them as they go through the times of their lives so that they have something concrete with which to describe to others what it was like to go on their first date, or learn how to dance for the first time, or to discover a moment of extravagant worship.

And the greatest irony of that is that as I look amongst my own photo albums, I find that--yes, I have captured those moments for others, even though I may not necessarily have shared them. There are graduation photos that I'll perhaps send to somebody 10 or 20 years down the line...birthday photos that are slightly out of focus, but nevertheless capture that sense of surprise and mirth...

...but there are precious few of those that I have captured of myself.

It's the photographer's dilemma. It's hard to be on both ends of the camera at once! The camera is but an extension of a person's eyes. And in some sense, by capturing others' moments, I am indeed capturing my own--from the very perspective with which I lived them out. And I give to others the joyous moments which my eyes captured as I shared in their happiness.

But at the same time, I wonder what it'd be like for somebody to surprise me one day with a collection of my most joyous moments, captured in vivid and wondrous detail.

Who knows when that might come to pass? Too often, my most wonderful times have happened without a photographer present. They've been solitary times in the depths of serene forests...silly times with friends who had nary a camera among them, or simple one on one encounters where the only way I'll ever be able to get a photograph is if some fly spy camera (heh. There's your obligatory pun of the day) were monitoring us as we took our guitars out and played late into the night.

Yes, I guess that I probably won't get many of those precious moments captured on film. A few, maybe...and perhaps I can indeed be pleasantly surprised someday. But for many, many others, I will have but my memory and my recollections to take me back to those times...

But I will not be alone. I will not be the sole bearer of those memories. Those who shared those times with me will be my eyes and ears in those moments that I forget and fail to use my own. They will reminisce with me...recount our adventures and our sorrows and our hopes and our joys. And when photographs and journal writings and whatnot are absent, we will simply recreate the moment on our own, building it out of what few recollections we still harbor.

Or we will simply continue to create new adventures...new joys...new moments.

We are all photographers. We are all historians. We are all authors of each others' chronicles. It matters not whether we own a Canon 10D, a scrappy little Holga, a simple camera phone, or no camera at all. The photographs we produce are merely tools that aid us when it is time to recreate the stories of our past.

Give me a choice between the most pristine photographs of my times of joy and the chance to rebuild them alongside those with whom I shared in the experience.

I will pick the latter every time.