kbehindthelens Photography » Our focus is on YOU.

Long ago, when I first picked up my camera, I never dreamed of becoming a photographer for hire.  I believed that I would challenge myself to start taking GOOD photos.  Of course, this is how the story goes with many photographers these days.  You’ll see the typical bio page featuring the oft seen quotes “I really became interested in photography when I started snapping images of my children and decided to make it my career”.  We all start somewhere – it’s what we choose to do with our talents and education that will allow us to stand apart from the onslaught of photographers these days.

DSLR cameras have become affordable and easy to use.  There are plenty of little quips and quotes and even full length blogs written on amateur photographers and often, they make fun of them.  I think all too often, the learned experienced photographers forget that they started out somewhere too.  Like with any “fad” job that brings easy self-employment (sometimes not exactly… legally) there are some that will try their hand, and some that will persevere.

Eight years later, I am here with too many lenses, a couple of bodies, amazing experiences and wonderful clients that I have gotten to know over those 8 years.  I have made plenty of mistakes, learned some very hard lessons.  Some of those lessons are more so about relationships with people and less so about business.  Sometimes you learn a wealth of lessons by looking at one image.

Irving Haberman: Photographer

I often find myself drawn to Google Image search.  The world is sometimes a much more heartfelt place (to me) when I see images captured forever in time.  Images that say so many things without any written word.  My heart melts, my eye open up, and I am inspired.  This image above was one such image I stumbled across today.

In a day where we’re fighting to compete, where we are trying to best not only others, but ourselves, this image humbles all people that carry photographers and profess to be “professionals”.  This is what photography is all about.  Capturing something that cannot ever be explained in words and immortalizing faces, places and times.  This image, some would say, isn’t properly “composed” and Mr. Haberman did not care that he needed to use flash to light up the expressive faces in the shot.  He just simply captured.  And if he hadn’t captured this image in 1946 of Marlene Dietrich welcoming home WWII troops in New York city (arguably one of my favorite places I have traveled to on this planet), then not one of us could see, feel or even in some way experience this amazing moment in time.

I have worked hard for 8 years to make myself a well rounded photographer.  Capturing every day life in Havana, dangerous waves in Australia, simple yet beautiful mud puddles in San Antonio, newborns, brides, monarch butterflies hell bent on photo bombing a shoot with one of my favorite families.  I have gone everywhere with camera in hand JUST to learn and see and capture and steal things that I will not remember when I am 80 years old.

One day, my favorite old farm house will no longer battle the elements.  I have already forgotten the name of the beautiful Cuban boy that smiled into my lens and then chased me down demanding “LADY! ONE PESO!” One day my own children will be older and I will be cleaning my grandchild’s baby barf off of my shoulder – insisting that “he just needed to be burped more!  He will get a tummy ache!”  One day, I will have a different camera body and I will have forsaken and forgotten one of the older ones that came with me on one of my amazing journeys.  But I will always have my memories and they will always be available to me at a moment’s notice to peruse and recollect any of my amazing experiences whether they were family, clients, friends doing their own type of much-too-old “cake smash” images or whether it will have been a documentation of church bells being raised again in a small sleepy town in our beloved Essex County.  Maybe, I will even go back and look at the shots that I have where Elton John seems to be scowling at me or Jon Bon Jovi is aiming his guitar directly into my camera. When I’m 80 and naive, I might think they were looking at me… but they weren’t.  They were communicating with my camera.  The vehicle through which images are captured and frozen in time forever.

I’m so proud to help capture these same memories for my cherished clients.  I am thrilled every day by a photographer and their work.  Can I steal this image idea and recreate it without being labeled a hack or a wannabe?  No, I can’t and I know that.  Mr. Haberman did what nobody else could have done at that very moment in time.  THAT’S what being a photographer is all about.

And that’s why I love what I do.  I will continue to do this… to document things from behind the lens.  To cherish my own memories and challenge my skills and capture things that will never happen again.

Thank you, Mr. Haberman.  One image just taught me a lessons I could never learn in school.