Recently I read that every job someone does solves a problem for someone else. Thinking of photography, I understood right away that sports photography solves problems for teams, sponsors, and companies by giving them art to use to promote their products. Landscapes solve the problem of bare, uninteresting walls by providing beautiful images to enjoy every day. But of all the kinds of photography I do, portraits solve the biggest problem of them all.

 

For most of us, it’s the people in our lives that matter most. But while we’re going about our lives time is changing everything around us. These daily changes happen so slowly they pass us by until enough of them add up to a distinct difference and we say, hey, how did you get so tall? Your missing tooth has grown back in! You’re not a little baby anymore… Time does it to all of us, every single day. My friends, that’s a problem.

 

When you want to really see something in a video, what do you do? You pause it, right? Stopping time allows our perception truly to focus on that moment and its magic. When things are moving, they often simply go too fast for us to really see them. 

That, my friends, is the magic of photography: it stops that otherwise inexorable progress from one moment to the next, allowing us to see things that otherwise would happen so quickly we either miss them, or must move on to the next thing before we’ve really savored the moment and all it has to show us.

 

So when I do a portrait session in my own, individual style (natural light, on location, preferably in a place that has some meaning to my subject), and I make photographs that catch those moments so that they are ours to share forever, that is what it’s all about.

 

Sometimes I think I should be photographing everyone I know all the time, because each of those moments that I don’t capture is gone forever.

 

Instead I’m grateful for every opportunity I get to make photographs that grow in value as time passes, that will mean more and more to parents and grandparents and children and grandchildren as time removes us from those moments that are now caught, matted, and framed on the wall.

 

Is there any better job than that? 

 

For more examples, please click here, and for pricing information, please click here. You can contact me via email: scott at scottjones.net, or via telephone: 510 612 2684

 

Images and text copyright Scott Jones, 2009