GETTING THE SHOT

“Are you out of your mind??!”

I was being pelted with snow flurries when my Mother called. She’d just found out that I was on the road during the worst snow storm New Orleans has seen in 200 years. Yes, I’m a forty-five year old man, perfectly capable of gauging how much danger I was putting myself in by driving around looking for things to photograph.

But my Mother is Italian, so that doesn’t count for much.

It’s okay. She doesn’t get it; I know. Most people don’t.

I’m a photographer. This is what we do. We want the shot. We have to be willing to do what it takes to get the shot.

Please understand… I’m not a daredevil or a thrill seeker. I’m certainly not fearless.

My job isn’t just to press a button on a camera. My job is to go out and discover the world from every angle. Especially the ones that scare us the most.

There are people right now who make way, way more money than me using a camera. Maybe it’s your friend, the single mom who takes family portraits. Maybe it’s a guy on YouTube who tests out new gear from Sony. And good for them. I’d happily do either of those things for a living.

But being a photographer isn’t about how much money you make. It’s about how you see the world. And it is about a nearly pathological need to show the rest of the world that vision.

Sometimes that requires risk.

A month ago, I climbed an old roller coaster. I set up my drone to record my climb from a bird’s eye view and strapped my camera gear to my back and went up a rusty, unattended spiral stairway to heaven, despite my deathly fear of heights. Why?

Because I wanted that shot.

I am a photographer.

This is what I do.