Go ahead. Write one paragraph describing your photographic vision, why you take pictures and what you want to do with them… without saying you are a photographer. Try it. Right now. It is not easy.

Come join in over at Don Gionnatti’s Project 52, and follow me here as I tackle this project myself.

I struggled with this assignment for quite a while. Thinking I was done, numerous times, I ended up with the following which turned out to be more of a mission statement than a vision statement:

Mission Statement

To capture thought-provoking glimpses of fleeting slices in time. To provide bookmarks, of sorts, that enables the viewer to look back through these snippets of time: to look back into the past at the history of the times that went before, no matter how recent nor how brief. To make the viewer stop and think, to feel the emotion. To create a rapport with the viewer that engages them for longer than a moment…

After rewriting the above statement about a dozen times, I was finally satisfied that it describes what it is that I am trying to do with my photography. But it is not a vision statement. So, after some considerable inner debating, I whittled away at my Mission Statement and penned my Vision Statement:

Vision Statement

“My vision is your vision. I want the emotion that I feel in my images to infuse into your emotions.”

I think that says it quite well. When I look at a scene and make my decision on the composition, and take the photograph: I want you the viewer of that image to feel what I felt at the moment that I created that image. To see the emotion in the image.

1/52 - Vision Statement