Why no recent blog posts? Well, it's because...(wait for it)...I kinda forgot I had one. That is until my buddy Stephen Karlisch asked me why I hadn't updated it. So, here we go. The picture above used to be in my portfolio and I'm not sure why it isn't now and if I should put it back in. Sometimes the memories of the actual shoot or personal feelings toward the person you are shooting cloud your judgement and the actual picture isn't as good as you think. Or maybe I just took it out because I didn't have many black and white photos in my portfolio and thought it was out of place? Maybe I'll put it back in soon...I still really like it and that should be enough, right? After I admitted to forgetting about my blog we started discussing what drives us in photography, what we are trying to achieve. Aside from jobs that we do for money only, why do we choose to shoot a given subject? Is there a mood or a story we are trying to tell or are we just trying to document what is happening already. We started tossing ideas back and forth because it's not always easy to articulate. What I learned from trying to explain to Stephen is that I'm trying to manufacture a decisive moment that doesn't look manufactured. Hopefully is makes you wonder what happened right before or right after the shot was taken. That is my ultimate goal. If you don't know what the decisive moment is, Google it...it's a concept that I'm just not good at explaining. One idea I use to explain it to myself, though, is that 'a photographer can take a series of photographs of the same subject with the same lighting in the same scene and one image is always better than the rest'. That is the decisive moment of that shoot. The light was perfect and the subject's mannerism or facial expression is giving you more than you expected. A lot of times the decisive moment is explained with street or documentary photography. You can sit on a street corner and photograph things that are happening and sometimes something really interesting happens...and the light is great...and you capture something that is unusual. That is also a decisive moment. That fraction of a second was different than all the other seconds you sat there watching.