photography

The GatheringAccording to the Kabbalah, in the beginning everything was God. When God contracted to make room for creation, spiritual energy filled the void. The energy poured into vessels which strained to hold the great power. The vessels shattered, sending countless shards, bits of the glowing matter, into the vastness of the universe.These scattered bits of divine light must be collected. When the task is done the forces of the dark will be vanquished and the world will be healed.

Embracing the LightCollected bits of truthShimmering sparksShards of lightMergeHealingRestoringBursting BrightRisingin divine ecstatic flame.

In photography and in life, always look for the light -- if you don't see it, bring it...

No, you don't shoot things. You capture them. Photography means painting with light. And that's what you do. You paint a picture only by adding light to the things you see.

When you approach something to photograph it, first be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence. Then don't leave until you have captured its essence.

If Life worked on auto mode then manual mode for photography would have never existed.

Capture every moments of your life.

Prayer Against the DarknessShekhinaPray for us now bound with scripture and shielded with shawlArmed with passion and loving carePray for us now against suffering, turmoil, and injusticePray for us now against the chaos of the dark.

The camera was a hand-held auxiliary of wanting-to-know. It had more than information and accuracy to teach me. I learned in the doing how ready I had to be. Life doesn't hold still. A good snapshot stopped a moment from running away. Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had. Making pictures of people in all sorts of situations, I learned that every feeling waits upon its gesture, and I had to be prepared to recognize this moment when I saw it. These were things a writer needed to know. And I felt the need to hold transient life in words - there's so much more of life that only words can convey - strongly enough to last me as long as I lived. The direction my mind took was a writer's direction from the start, not a photographer's or a recorder's.

All photos speak a thousand words. This one contained a library.

The artistic creation of the poet, painter, photographer, and writer is a reflection of the artist__ inner world. The agenda of consciousness that spurs all forms of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but to portray its inward significance to the creator. A great poem, painting, photograph, and written composition fully express what the creator feels, in the deepest sense, about the distinctively depicted image that captured their imagination.

The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

Photography is never real, it__ merely one of many ways of telling the truth.

I guess if there__ one thing I can say about the 21st century, it__ that the 21st century is all flash and no substance_ everything is digital, nothing but files of invisible electronic data on computers and mindless zombies on their cellular phones_ it__ sad how because of the digital age, society is ultimately doomed. Nothing in the digital age is real anymore, and you know, they say celluloid film and ray tube televisions and maybe even paper might become obsolete in this century? _What__ most annoying is that nobody cares, they__e just learned to accept the digital age and get addicted to it_ none of them are ever going to step up and say to the world, __ou__e all a bunch of sheep!_ and even if they did say anything, I doubt anyone would listen_ they__e all too obsessed and attached to their cellular phones and overly big televisions and whatever other moronic things they__e got these days_ it almost makes me want an apocalypse to happen, to erase digital technology and force the world to start over again.

Alford, Massachusetts: Mandy stood there with her old Nikon film camera, snapping photo after photo of the rural landscape. It was difficult to describe the wonderful feeling of there not being a single cell phone in sight; the only modern technology around was the faint blue glow of a cathode ray tube television in the window of a nearby house, and a few cars and trucks parked in crumbling gravel driveways. She was allowed to see this place, one that would likely be ruined by the 21st century as time went on_ places like these were extremely hard to find these days. A world of wood-burning cookstoves and the waxy smell of Paraffin, laundry hung out to dry, rusty steel bridges over streams that reflected the bright blue skies, apple pies left out on windowsills_ a world of hard work with very little to show for it aside from the sunlight beaming down on a proud community. And Mandy wanted to trap it all in her Kodak film rolls and rescue it from the future.

Film photography will always be superior to digital - because no matter how many lasers and instant buttons and HD pixels you've got, a human being can take a photograph with much more integrity and meaning than one a built-in robot took.

I grew up in an era that was a golden age of the blockbuster, when something we might call a family film could have universal appeal. That's something I want to see again. In terms of the tone of the film, it looks at where we are as a people and has a universality about human experience.