The Camera brings Life

“Life is like a camera. Just focus on what’s important and capture the good times, develop from the negatives, and if things don’t work out, just take another shot.” – Anonymous

A camera in hand brings awareness of the moments in front of you, fully immersed into the present (day-to-day life is left behind). Fully focused, you find the subtleties and details hardly noticed by others. Equally important is the experience beyond the camera; experiencing more fully what is before our eyes and perceiving it with greater sensitivity. Therefore, if how we live our moments we can live our lives, then the person who has learned to experience those moments more fully will experience life more fully. 

The camera is a gift leading us to fill our lives with incredible moments in unexpected places. Without the camera, most of us would feel lost and miss the adventures that fill our souls. Chasing the light in those last faraway places, filled with treasures, is often challenging mentally and physically, but it brings greater depth to our lives. As days and weeks pass, challenges and negatives fall away from memory, leaving one to contemplate the moments, through a photograph, that they might otherwise have forgotten or even unnoticed in the first place. 

Travel memories and photographs are forever
Leave a Legacy

When that camera first gets into your hands, everything is magical and memory cards are made quickly. However, in time one starts to understand that every movement, up, down, or sideways changes the perspective of the frame. Soon a photographer begins to pay attention to light and how it changes the vision of the outcome. Next, a photographer learns to value the shadows and the mystery and power they add to the dynamics of the image. Those who have traveled with me or studied with me know my saying, “Side lighting creates shadows and shadows create shape.” This is a parallel in life; if applied, we know that dark times add value to the brighter ones. 

The camera has given me a richer life. It continues to challenge me, but with a passion to meet those challenges.

What has been difficult is applying what the camera and photography have taught to real life. The shadows are as important to the outcome as the light. Moments are seldom repeatable. One almost seems fearless when the camera, experience and photograph drive the risk, encouraging the next adventure and shoot, even if failure was the previous outcome.  We understand the quality of a moment that will never be repeated and press the shutter without thought or hesitation, to seize the moment before it is lost forever. In the camera, “it is only pixels,” but in real life, there may be more consequences, so we pause and think first, sometimes never clicking.  

Seize the moment or loose it. Do it with the same passion as clicking the Sutter.

As the years pass more quickly, I am more aware than ever there that there are fewer moments ahead than the ones that have passed. This gives me the courage to continue to take risks through failures that are raw and recent; ones that almost broke me as a person in which I did not rise to the occasion and surely affect some of those around me negatively. 

I now need to reflect on the lessons of the camera and develop the negative into something beautiful again. We all have the power to make positive changes and use shadows to create power in the light. 

I am grateful to each one of you for enriching my life. I am excited to create many beautiful moments together in 2023. This is a special year to celebrate ten challenging and over-the-top incredible years of Piper Mackay Photo Safaris, which the pandemic delayed by two years.

I wish you all a wonderful and beautiful 2023 and leave you with one of my favorite quotes.

“Fear never pushes forward in the same way it holds us back”

-Daymond John