I don’t think I have ever shot a picture of an intersection. I mean an intersection with no drama. Vehicles standing still, waiting for the green light. It doesn’t ‘talk’ to me. It’s boring. I’m not even lifting my camera, finger hovering above shutter release. Nope.

A few years back I was reading a book about Stockholm, Sweden. My hometown. It was a lot of pictures of gas stations. Intersections. People getting on buses. Ordinary, everyday life pictures.

I just couldn’t stop watching the pictures! The pictures were fascinating on so many levels.

That’s when it hit me. My photography is about NOW. A fun situation NOW. I don’t think about NOT-NOW. I’m not sure this has to do with the digital revolution and less and less prints are made. Pictures are now stored on backup stations and hard drives. No physical photo albums. The ones I loved flipping through when I was young. And still do, for the record.

What do I want to say with this post?

Yesterday I read a post on Mashable about a photographer, Clifton R. Adams, shooting color pictures in England around 1928. I love these kind of pictures! Pictures of ‘an intersection with no drama. Vehicles standing still, waiting for the green light’. The kind of pictures I don’t bother shooting…

It’s nothing wrong about shooting NOW. But NOW can be a pretty boring picture NOW and fantastic picture LATER. Like the pictures from England. You see how people walk and stand. What they wear. Interactions. Buildings. Billboards. Fascinating!

Also my wife has told me I’m not that good at documenting our daughters. And she is right. She could ask me to shoot pictures of them playing but all I saw was bad light. How sad is that? So now I try to document more. Shoot pictures that will be a historic document about our lives later on.

I have to stop shooting NOW pictures and see my role in history :)