Live From Around the World

A Photographer’s Perspective

July 24, 2010, Israel

posted by Nena, a youth group member

Photography has been what I love to do since I was about thirteen years old. My Nikon D40 is my best friend and I can spend hours wandering around a landscape. I'm always the one on trips who pops up with a camera when you least expect or want it. Not only do I insist on capturing as many pictures as a I can but I also pretty much refuse to delete photos for reasons of sentimentality. This combination makes me both the most annoying and the most valuable on trips, people hate when I force them into one more pose but then they realize that I have captured every moment.

This has made Israel quite an experience and has brought along a new feeling. As usual I have taken over five hundred photos so far but I can't help but feel like what I capture is not equal to what i see. This is nothing new, a frustration with my camera. Moments where my camera doesn't see enough light to take a picture or my flash blows out a formally beautiful moment make me want to throw my camera across the room. Here it's different though. Some of the things I am seeing take my breath away but when I look at the display screen on my Nikon it's not comparable. Like when we arose to watch a sunrise in the desert I felt like no matter how many pictures I took, it wouldn't be enough to explain or show the people back home how amazing it was. Sunsets, while beautiful and incredible, blow out the picture so you can't see the landscape.

Constantly I find myself wondering how I can show someone a picture to someone ands expect them to understand what we saw though a photo. Moment come for an instant and then they are gone. Suns rise and set and people move though their paces. Memories fade until they become distorted. What the people I photograph don't realize is that each photo I take is a memory and even if they think they look awful it's still a moment that happened and I want to remember it when I'm old and decrepit. I like to remember, and I suppose my love of photos comes from a firm sense of nostalgia.

I suppose I'll have to learn to appreciate the moment instead of constantly trying to save. I certainly won't stop taking pictures but to quote John Mayer's song 3x5 "today I finally overcame, trying to fit the world inside a picture frame."

Photos by Nena