Lazy Summer Weekends
14th January 
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There is nothing quite as good as a lazy summer weekend. Sand between your toes, sweaty glass in your hand and the sunset still hours away. It’s those moments you wish would never end that pass by way too quickly. That is why photography was invented, to capture those moments for all eternity, make them last forever.
Of course you have to bring your camera and of course you have to capture the essence of those precious few days, so much more if you are in the company of a sexy man with a face like a horse that is so endearing!
The bigger challenge however is to then sit down and sift through all of those pictures and find just the few that will tell the story without boring the hell out of people, because believe it or not, you are the only person on this planet that thinks that zillion mostly crappy pictures of the same thing will carry someone’s attention to the next series with similar problem.
That is why editing was invented and to tell the truth since I have decided to photograph stories rather than random single gorgeous pictures, I have grown to admire talented photo editors. It takes an incredibly patient person with a great eye and talent to be able to illustrate a story with a series of images or just a single one.
I only have to go through the painful process of purging 99% of what I created in order to show just 1%. But how much more powerful is the 1% if done well! I shot 138 photographs for this story. But I decided to show only 9. Maybe even that is too much, but I couldn’t let go anymore. They were all technically excellent, compositionally mostly great, but what it came down to was the subtlety of the emotional response they evoked.
Some people are great storytellers. I on the other hand prefer to communicate visually. The problem is, our attention spans are so exhausted and tiny, that expecting from someone to stick with what they glanced at for another second or so is expecting a bit much. It’s a huge commitment. But if you are somehow emotionally invested in the story from the beginning, you will make it through to the end.
Photography offers instant gratification until you realize that you have to spend a day editing and thinking about how to present your ideas and make them work as a story. All of a sudden a technician is expected to be an artist, a poet. That’s one reason why not every guy with a camera can call himself a photographer.