When anyone first picks up photography, there’s some elements that we struggle to grasp, we spend our whole lives trying to master the craft so that we can communicate our vision; our message.  Then there are some elements that we just gravitate to immediately.  For some it could be technical,  such as lighting using the inverse square method, exposing a scene using  the Zone System so effectively, you’d think that it was the second coming of Ansel.  It could be layering an image with foreground / background items so detailed, that within that one frame, there are multiple stories waiting for the viewer to discover and interpret.  For me, I’ve always thought that my eye for composition was my strongest aspect of my photography.  Any time the camera comes up to my eye, my brain is always looking for patterns, shapes, repetition (how I love repeating shapes/patterns/objects in a photo), lines, etc.  Looking through a rather recent roll shot with my Holga just reinforced that.

The question now is, what am I going to do to improve that?  I need to learn to tell better stories.  I’m starting to see myself more as a narrative shooter, anytime I shoot a photo, I find myself thinking “What goes along with this?  There are other frames to this story.”  Every photo has to be like a sentence in an overall story, some can stand alone, but others without the reference point of the story fall apart when taken out of context.