This is all so fleeting and ephemeral – so temporary. Everything we are, everything we do is so transient. Time is a series of events – all temporary. All moments. None permanent. They only remain as memory if they even make it that far and even then only if they are not later culled from the minutia of our lives until all we recall is a general sense of things. So much of what we experience is fleeting and momentary.
There’s always an urgency for me when I’m shooting. Most of what I see in the world is fleeting and short lived – a momentary alignment where the light, the shadow, the subject, the colour, the framing – all of it are perfect. Where it matches my mind’s eye.
When I first began as a photographer this really frustrated me. I could almost never move fast enough to capture these elusive moments. My equipment was much slower then and I was not as familiar with it as I am now. But faster equipment could only take me so far. At one point, I imagined having a continuous image stream would solve the problem – that I could later sift through to find that perfect moment. But I soon realized that idea was so problematic it would make more trouble than it solved.
In the end I got familiar with the circumstances that might lead to a moment and would prepare myself in the hope it would actually happen. It became mostly a waiting game.
Ironically, my last four bodies of work have incorporated all of these methods, including a mediated continuous image stream – where I pull the trigger often during the right circumstances, trying to catch the perfect alignment.