Most weekends during spring, summer and fall, you can find me in a church or a country club or an outdoor garden. I’ll be dressed in fairly atypical photographer clothing -- a white shirt, tie, and dress pants -- and I’ll be looking-looking-looking as I always do, and moving, like a nervous fisherman who knows there are fish somewhere in a river, as he is walking-walking-walking up and down the riverbank, thinking action on his part will somehow get him closer to the fish.
I’m looking for the unplanned, the unchoreographed, the unexpected. I’m looking for surprises. Take the image above, for example. I thought I was on the trail of one kind of image (or fish) when another happened.
I was in a church minutes before a wedding ceremony was about to take place, photographing a sweet moment between my bride and her little flower girl. I was shooting through a doorway and trying to be unseen, working with a fairly long lens at some distance from the bride and the child. A wedding guest, trying to be “helpful,” saw me and told the little girl that the photographer was taking her picture and that she should smile. Like that, the encounter between the bride and the flower girl ended, and the child’s energy and curiosity became directed at me.
Just then, however, the door began to swing closed...and a new photographic possibility began to present itself. I watched that expression of curiosity linger on the child’s face and I waited for fractions of a second that seemed like an hour as the door closed, closed, nearly-closed, and then I fired the camera.
The photograph above isn’t one that will likely make it into my portfolio or be one of my all-time favorites, but it’s a nice little picture, and the story of how it came to be made is indicative of how pictures -- and life -- often unfold in ways that can’t be predicted.
