Posted by Lilit Aloyan on October 15, 2009 at 3:46pm
I suppose I’ve never been able to separate myself from the arts. I’ve tried it all – learning to dance, painting, attempting to teach myself to play the guitar, pottery (kind of), and my latest love, photography. It’s simple to find something compelling, and to just point and shoot. But that’s not all you’re doing. Sure, you’re also “documenting” life experiences, but aside from that, you’re stopping time.I’m sure we’ve all heard someone say that sometimes, we just need to stop, step back, and take a good look at everything. We’ve all also heard, or perhaps said it ourselves, that the ability to pause all motion and move about freely would be one hell of a power. The closest we get to all that is through photography, and that’s why I do it. Of course I love to capture a person’s smile, but, though it sounds sad, I love it even more when I happen to capture that usually-jubilant person’s frown – when he or she is unmasked. I can also see what was going on with others while my focus was on something else. When I take a picture of a child marveling at someone else’s birthday cake, I don’t notice his mother’s worried look as she hopes her son doesn’t just grab a piece from it. Photographs therefore become “all-seeing eyes” – you don’t realize just how much you can’t see until you go back to that one second that you managed to capture.One doesn’t necessarily need to be an “artist” to be able to take beautiful or captivating photographs – all that’s needed is a reason. You might take a picture of a smile because you want to capture happiness, or maybe of a sunset because you feel like it’s the kind of thing that will legitimize your skills. But then when you look at the photographs, you may notice that that smile doesn’t seem quite as genuine as you thought it was, or that the sunset is more than just something nice to look at, but also a reason to feel like the world isn’t such a bad place after all. Photography is the ultimate way to get a better understanding of people and the environment you live in.
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