This life.

Being a photographer is a horribly stressful, scary, ambitious, difficult, impossible thing.

Lately though, as I've been going through my portfolio to build something for my agent, filmservice.cz I've begun to realize how much I've actually done. How much I've shot, how much I've seen.

It's amazing.

Maybe I'm in just one of those sentimental moods, but I feel overwhelmed by the sense that I am doing what I had intended to do all along. For all those years before I picked up the camera, this is exactly what I had been thinking when I closed my eyes. I'm doing exactly what I was meant to do.

Every time you look at your own stuff, it's like looking at your own biography. Your own retrospective. Can you imagine the number of people you meet? From all over the world? Looking through the pictures it absolutly blows my mind. From just the past couple months I have nearly 20,000 photos on my computer. I mean, think about that. (Wow Digital!) But at the same time, wow photography! I've always thought I didn't take *enough* pictures. But here before me I keep a record of all the things I had forgotten I had captured.

There is a great deal of heart break in it too though. Lots of it. You have pictures upon pictures of lovers who are now lost to you. You have friends who are now lost to you. You have faces without names, and even names without faces. For photographers, we are immortalizing moments as they occur for us. They are moments as we perceive them. They are our experiences, ones that we can only capture an infinitely small slice of. The before, the after, is something that will forever elude us. Time eludes the image. The image is but our poor attempt at seizing a moment in time that never stands still.

It's beautiful in it's futility. It's beautiful in that we pursue it none-the-less.