Photography as a lifestyle

I never intended to become a photographer. Throughout my life I had no interest in the art of photography or cameras themselves. I became a photographer because of a break up at the end of my senior year in high school. We had spent two years together in what would probably be some of the more defining years of our lives and after it all only had maybe a handful of photos together. I didn't journal about our relationship and I knew my memory would fail me, so essentially our lives together would come to fade into a sentence. Six years after the fact, it mostly has become a paragraph at best.

Shortly after this realization I went out and bought my first digital pocket camera. Everywhere I went the camera came with me. And it began to change the way I lived my life. Were my photos interesting? If not, I needed to live a more interesting life. Did the same people and places show up too many times? Then I needed to change my life. Everything got organized by the year, month and day. My life in chronological order. Not one photo deleted, every memory saved.

Even now years after the fact I still live by that same mentality. Though my camera has grown in size and the quality of the photos which I produce has gotten better, I do it cause I want to remember my life and the people I experienced it with. There is never an occasion too trivial to leave my camera at home for. Though there are moments when I leave my camera at my side, cause with wisdom I learned some moments you need to simply experience and let go of.

It is odd to think that my relationship in high school would give me a career, but if you allow yourself to reflect on significant moments in your life you can maybe find that which means the most to you. To me it is that which I experience with the people I love, the adventure of life. Photography is a means of remembering the adventure. So it has become my passion, my lifestyle.