This may be one of the saddest photos I’ve ever seen

http://www.time.com/time/photoessays/iraq_war_families/5.html

Now I take alot of pictures. Sometimes they’re good pictures too. What I have never been comfortable with doing is taking pictures of people because it always feels like I’m intruding. I still take pictures of people but I don’t like doing it.

So the first thought after seeing that photo and thinking “that’s the saddest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen” was “man, that photographer had a lot of balls to take that picture.”

“Don’t mind this camera in your face. Just cry like you were.”

Which is an odd thing when you think about it. That’s a problem with being behind a camera a lot. You start to lose the reality of life and start to think about everything as if it were a “shot”.

I’ve been helping someone shoot a movie and have been doing research on lighting lately. A few days ago, there was a gathering to see off Paul who was leaving for the great Northwest.

So I’m there at the party and I’m drinking beer and chatting with people and half of my non-spoken thoughts sound something like, “How would I shoot this? That red wall would be a challenge.”

I’ve been spending lots of time behind a camera and I’m instinctively ponderign the framing of shots even when I don’t have a camera in my hands. The world is a plaything that has lost it’s tinge of reality.

The point I think I’m trying to make is that everything is fair game for other people’s entertainment and that you have to be a right bastard to take that kind of picture. “Ooooo…that baby only has 5 flies on his face but that near dead one over there is covered in maggots! What a great shot!…Huh! Girl running down the road skin on fire. What a great shot!”

There’s something odd about us people with cameras.