Ivan Completes Week 1 Blog Entries

Why I Take Photographs

Why? Well because… I primarily take photographs of things I want to remember. I could present an artzy reason but it’s really very simple. I have a bad memory and sometimes it needs a little help. Of course I might be struck by something I see as being odd or beautiful, but I really would like to remember friends and family and places I have lived. It all goes away so fast in this day and age as things change and “progress” keeps occurring. When I was younger I never thought much of keeping any records but then I lost so much because I didn’t. There is no catch up in this game, you either have it or you don’t . So I am going to do the best with what I have left. That’s pretty much my reason for taking photographs, it’s simple and to the point.

Photographs I Imagined Taking When I Bought My Camera

When I bought my first camera I imagined taking pictures of UFO’s and things that go bump in the night. Of course I have never seen a UFO and the only things that go bump in the night is usually me tripping over the cat. have taken the occasional picture of family and friends but I never realized the importance of it until the last year and an half when my father and then my mother died. I had very few pictures of them that really captured who they were. I would have loved to get a picture of my mother out in the woods with her digging tools, flannel shirt and her 44 pistol strapped to her hip. She loved to be out in the woods digging up old dumps left by the miners in the late 1800’s. She had quite a collection of old bottles and bits and pieces of history. My father on the other hand wanted to mine gold or farm. He wasn’t very particular about which, I managed to capture a few good pictures of him and his brother so I am fortunate there. The one important thing is that I thought about when I purchased my latest camera is how to capture who a person was, not so much what they looked like. Nobody looks “real” wearing a suit and tie in some studio picture. You have to capture them when they are being who they are. I would rather have that picture of my mother covered in dirt with a big grin on her face holding an old bottle then any studio picture. A picture is worth a thousand words it is said, but sometimes it’s not the words that are important.