I’ve often wondered if everyone else sees what I see. As a child, I remember looking at things and asking others what they were seeing – I wanted to know if my eyes, my brain, my senses were seeing what everyone else was seeing. I wanted to know if what I was seeing was “normal”, or if it was somehow being warped or changed as it was being processed through my eyes.

Throughout my life I developed an appreciation for art – mostly for photography, but also for things like sculpture, paintings, abstracts. And throughout that time of discovery, I realized one important thing – that people DON’T see things the same. You don’t even need to look much further than artists like Picasso or Monet to recognize that most of us have a unique view of the world.

Which makes art, like photography, such a gift.

It gives us the chance to frame our view of the world at any given moment and to capture it permanently. Oftentimes, words cannot express what it is we are seeing. But through our camera, we can hold on to that view… we can frame it, compose it, expose it… and when we press down the shutter we capture that image that is unique to us, to our eyes.

Go out shooting with a friend – choose something to shoot together. And I guarantee that you will both come back with different images.

THAT is the beauty of photography.