Sometimes I think….. well, ponder really, about the first camera and the first time people saw a photograph. I often wonder what they thought. In this day of cell phone cameras, we really take photography for granted, maybe more than we ever have. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, I just like to stay in touch with the roots of photography and what it is.. and does.

I seem to recall reading that American Indians, some of them at least, wouldn’t allow themselves to be photographed as they feared that part of their soul would be stolen and locked in the photograph. Something like that. You can’t really blame them as photography must have seemed kind of magical.

One of my favorite aspects of photography is that, with each press of the shutter, a slice of time is captured forever. Sometimes, as it turns out, the slice in time captures something that isn’t going to be around much longer, even if that isn’t known when the photo is made.  I’ve photographed several structures only to find out some time later that they had been demolished or changed in some way. That gives the photograph a special meaning, to me at least.

The shack in this photo, which was already in pretty bad condition when this photo was taken, was eventually reclaimed by nature. It will live on, however, in this image forever.

If there is something more important about photography than that, I don’t know what it is!