Your Eyes Are the Camera

My rediscovery of photography after nearly two decades has been one of the pillars of my transformation over the past year. I need to write an entirely separate article on why photography is a fantastic form of me­ditation. But before that, I’d like to discard some of the burdens that people new to photography might be going through.

For starters, what if I told you that you don’t need a thousand photos to call yourself a photographer? Heck, you don’t even need a camera. And no, not because your phone already has one, but because most of us were gifted with not one, but two fantastic cameras that diligently serve us non-stop.

Our eyes.

See, a photograph is only the last step in a long series of events that led to it. For most people, the final photo is the only thing in the entire process that has any value. I think that’s wrong. Photos are a great way to remember the past or convey a certain message to others. However, by focusing on getting that final past perfect, we often sacrifice our experience, our feelings, and our emotions at the time we saw something worth taking a shot of, and pointed our camera at it. And, I am starting to think that this is the real beauty of photography - being right then and there, seeing the hidden beauty of otherwise mundane subjects.

When I began taking photos again, I first bought a big and bulky DSLR. It proved too cumbersome to carry around all the time, so I swapped it for a smaller camera. This is when my obsession with taking that “perfect shot” began. You know, the one that people on Instagram and YouTube always have a solution for. Either the camera you use isn’t the right one, or it’s the editing software. Or perhaps, you just need to buy their presets and film simulations (psst, I have one, too), and that would solve it. Shooting JPEG? Well, you need to do RAW, live real profis do. Shooting RAW? You’re wasting your time editing. Just get a Fujifilm, and the camera will basically nail the shot for you. Bought a Fuji? Well, you obviously have too much money to spare on Internet hypes. The list can go on, and on, and on.

For the past year, I must have taken a few thousand photos, of which only a handful will pass for decent ones. This was frustrating. I mean, you spend your time looking for things that catch your attention, snap a few hundred shots, come back home, figure out that most aren’t in focus, or maybe the exposure wasn’t right, and salvage only a couple.

This is when I knew I was looking at the wrong things. I was projecting my thoughts onto pulling the perfect photo, while the perfect photo basically stood in front of me the whole time.

And, it dawned on me. You are not a photographer, just because you carry a fancy camera with you all the time. Neither, is it because you can shadow and highlight sliders in Lightroom. You are a photographer, because you see beauty in everyday life, and you don’t need a camera to capture it. Use your eyes for that. Stay there, frame the shot, store it in your mind.

For yourself.