It's only a photo...

I heard someone utter those very words a few days ago ..... "It's only a photo", unfortunately I couldn't say anything .. that's the problem with eavesdropping ... you can only listen and not participate in the discussion. 

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I often think about what it takes to do the images on billboards I see splashed on my daily journey. A simple photo can have an army of people involved .... especially when you start thinking of all the meetings it must of created before the actual photo was even taken.

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My own images might not involve a bus load of willing or paid helpers but they still require a lot of planning.

This portrait is a good example of an image coming into being.

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This image looks uncomplicated enough to the eye but its more than just pointing my camera at a doll and pushing a button.

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A look behind the scene tells a very different story.

Once I have a vision of what I would like the image to look like there is the location, the lights, the mood that all needs to be taken into consideration, once all those elements have come together and the shutter is pressed .... then all those elements are frozen in that photograph.

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You might think its only a photo ..... but it's a moment in time captured on a sheet of paper .... forever ...... and the beauty of that moment is that it only gets better with time ..... the older a photo gets, the more the meaning changes of that very same photograph.

 

A simple photo of the street outside you house might be the most boring photo you have seen today, but that very same photo will have a very different meaning to you in 10 years time and a completely different meaning to someone who will see it in a 110 years time.

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It's not just a photo ... it's a moment in time ... it's a frozen slice of time.

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