Sometimes I look through the viewfinder, and I am overwhelmed with pure aesthetics. I follow the light where it takes me. This mood is relatively rare, and the results in retrospect are not always great. In fact, frequently the results are just trite.
But sometimes they aren’t.
I have never understood the contempt some photographers have for digital. I save almost all the photos I’ve ever taken. Pre-digital photos sit in boxes, slowly fading, but the digital photos look just the same as when I first took them. It is quite possible they could look the same ten thousand years from now.
But honestly, much of the time I take pictures as memos. Pictures out bus windows, just to remember what I saw. Pictures of something on an ad, pictures of the wifi password at a hotel. These pictures are useful, rather than beautiful or interesting.
Here’s a picture of the almost dry Li River in China. A memory:
