When you are in the habit of capturing what you see with a camera, you are inevitably revealing quite a bit of yourself. Maybe what you love. Maybe what you miss. Maybe what you think. What lifts you up or brings you down. Mmmm, what we notice speaks volumes about who we are, where we live: sentimentally, intellectually, emotionally, aspirationally - or actually, naturally. Perception is very indicative of what is underneath. When you take a picture, somewhere in the image, there is an explanation for why that moment is what you wanted to have forever. The action is fleeting but the implication... I shouldn't speak in general.

For me. Photography is not purely visual... for me. At all. It has everything to do with the emotional response something I see summons and what 1-1,000,007 memories and moments that thing called to mind, all of which combine together in a bolt of energy that shoots out the tip of my finger with just enough force to push... &CLICK. The picture.

Photography is something special in my life. A love. It is a way for me to show a very big part of myself that I either can't or won't show just anyone, in other ways. It is a way to show that I believe there is beauty in most things... that I believe unapologetically in the importance and beauty of love, peace, kindess, empathy, compassion, honesty, loyalty. Very naturally, it allows me to express what I don't say... because something about just saying it feels ridiculous. So - I am hidden all around these pictures. In them. They make me laugh and smile and they remind me of things I have lived and felt. And I'd like to try to share with you the why behind these whats.

So here we go.

"The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth--the filth, the war, the poverty--was that life could be capable of small beauties. He wasn't interested in the glorious tales of the afterlife or the notions of a honey-soaked heaven. To him that was a dressing room for hell. Rather, he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it. Out of that came some sort of triumph that went beyond theological proof, a cause for optimism against all the evidence." ~ from, Let the Great World Spin

Or, put it this way: