Evolution

I finally put together a portrait portfolio today, so that I actually have a gallery on the Gallery page, and I will be adding a wedding portfolio soon, I hope.  Although slogging through thousands of photos to find your best for a portfolio can be tedious, it can also be a great opportunity to revisit old shots.  In the course of finding some of my favorite portraits over the past couple of years, not only did I see how I have evolved, but I found some forgotten gems, and also had the opportunity to revisit and re-edit some old favorites, just to see what would happen.

The image above was what I would define as one of the first portraits I took that gave me some idea of what I believed I could do.  That shot was followed by this one a little bit later (and several hundred not-so-good photos later):

By that photo, I was definitely hooked.  That was almost exactly two years ago (I’m a few days late with this post).  Since then, I have gone through five different camera bodies and numerous lenses in the pursuit of the best combination–the one that would suit me perfectly, and allow to realize my vision without getting in my way.  In retrospect, the Nikon D200 could have been that camera.  It was my favorite camera, but I was never happy with its high ISO performance in low light–the noise was always ugly and hard to get rid of.  My current body, which involved an entire system switch, is the Canon 5D–an incredible camera that has already made history, and I think will always be remembered as  a landmark in digital photography.

One constant throughout the evolution of my photography, and of my portraiture in particular, has been one of my muses.  If I had to credit all that I have learned about taking good photos of people–and of children in particular–to one person, it would have to be my goddaughter, Lila Christie.  I have come from that photo of her, almost three weeks old, up to the present, as she nears her 2nd birthday.

As I have watched her grow, so too have I watched my own photos evolve.  Not only has she provided a usually willing subject, but because I have taken photos of her as she grows, I have been able to see what things work, and what things don’t.  I have learned how to make children smile, how to get the best light in their eyes, to be ready and quick to catch the fleeting moments of their childhood.  And that’s probably the most important part, for me: catching those fleeting, too-brief moments of a child’s life.  As I have learned with the birth of my own son, you don’t know how quickly time flies until you watch your child grow. like a weed, before your very eyes.

One day they look like this:

And then, next thing you know, they’ve grown from a little baby into a little child, all in what seems like the blink of an eye.  Before I had my own child, I had no idea how much and how quickly they change and grow.  You can be told, you can even watch your goddaughter grow at regular intervals, but it still doesn’t really prepare you for the time warping of parenthood.

I  take photos of other things, of course.  I like to shoot buildings and other things that are being reclaimed by nature.  I like to shoot landscapes, though I hardly have time for that sort of thing anymore.  I love to record Durham, the city where I’ve always lived–the city that I’d never really seen until I picked up a camera and started looking, really looking, at what was around me.

Which is all to say that it has been–and continues to be–a fascinating journey as I’ve gone from interest, to hobby, to obsession, and now, hopefully in some way, to profession.  Some days are exhilarating, others incredibly frustrating, but I can’t even express how much I’ve enjoyed the ride, and how interesting it is to see where I’ve been and what I’ve seen.

So thanks, Lila, for being a beautiful and joyful model.  And thanks Dad, for convincing me that I needed the D70, and that I would actually enjoy using it in France.  And thank you, Durham, for being a funky and photographic city.  And thanks to everyone else who has put up with a camera in their face so often that you probably don’t know what I look like without a DSLR in hand or in front of my face.  And lastly, thanks to Hanna–thanks for always being encouraging, for always believing, for allowing me to follow something that has become one of the most important parts of my life.

I apologize for the sappiness, but that’s what happens sometimes when you really start to think about what’s important to you, and how lucky you are to have all the wonderful things you have in your life.