Pink and Yellow and What kind of photography do you do?

I was going to do more of the abandoned warehouse but I am postponing it for a day or two.  Instead I want to answer a question that was put to me a couple of times yesterday…”What kind of photography do you do?”  I don’t know when it finally tweaked that last nerve of mine but it did yesterday.  With the omnipresence  of camera phones and tablets and other phones (and no! I am not belittling those of you who take photos that way so don’t get your knickers in a twist) everyone is a photographer now or they have a friend or relative who is one.  And sometimes they are fantastic photographers and sometimes…well we know the rest of the story.

But still there is a mindset that when asked what kind of photography do you do, if you don’t answer portrait or wedding they don’t know what to make of you or just nod politely and then go on about that friend/relative who just did a wedding or senior portrait shoot.  What’s difficult to understand when I say that while I also do portraits and events, my love is art photography.  And I have to explain what that is every time.  When I tried to explain it to someone yesterday they replied “Oh, still life photos?”  Sigh.  I’m not purely a nature photographer but I love capturing the beauty that is in nature be it plant or animal.  I’m not purely a travel or street photographer but you know I will do that in a minute if my eye sees the opportunity.  I will muck around in an abandoned building as quickly as a sparkly shiny skyscraper and I am thrilled when I see unusual hood ornaments at a car show.

So some could say that I don’t have a specialty; that I’m spread out all over the place and there is a speck of truth to that – maybe I do need to narrow my focus.  But at the end of the day when I put the camera back into her bag (yes, she is a she) what I have shot are things that have appealed to me artistically.  Those reflective drops of water on this flower, the beauty of a sunset at just the right point, the long ago faded paint on a brick wall, a bird sitting atop a cactus with the sun hitting it’s eye just right, a homeless man asleep on the step of a church…I see beyond what is immediately there and into the beauty and art that is waiting to come forth.

That is the art I capture and create.  That is the photographer I am.  And that is the kind of photography I do.