Why you take pictures?

It's a 50 year old habit, and can't/ don't want to break. but it's more than that. I used to be an over-the-road truck driver, amoung other things. How many times have I seen some wonderful "something", and just wished some one had been there, so that I could say, "wow, look"! Photography let's me say "wow, look", later. When I come in from a short walk with the camera, the wife says, "did you get anything good, with the camera"? It's a love affair with beauty, kept alive with the memory catcher, the camera. Just something else to thank the Lord for.
 
For a couple of reasons:
I like the sensory feeling of a camera in my hands;
and like Luke said, every once in a while as I go through my pictures I'll see one of my pictures that I have done everything right and gives me a feeling of accomplishment that I could have, for a brief moment, captured a moment in time with an image that I love looking at.
 
There is an emotional and aesthetic appeal, and a sense of creating something by carving out a particular section of a scene. I also love the sense of camera in hand, and to the eye, I think much as my Dad enjoyed the feel of his woodworking tools. An addictive, even essential, mix.

Basically I just can't help myself.
 
I don't really like the physical act of taking pictures. I just like walking around looking at the world and imagine what it looks like through the lens. Sometimes I will actually lift up the camera to my face and take a picture, and sometimes the mental image and the actual picture coincide. But it doesn't happen often. But I like looking at the world this way. I end up noticing all sorts of things I wouldn't have.
 
I take photographs to celebrate the beauty of the earth. I studied photography a little bit in college (shortly after the Civil War), but digital photography has really opened the door to full-out enjoying photography because it hs radically dropped the cost of photography and shortened the time between taking a photograph and seeing what the results are.
 
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