But this was different: I wanted to cry simply because I was shooting, and it felt so good.

It takes a certain kind of personality to be a wedding photographer, to have done around 250 weddings and love the job more each time. There are certainly ways to spend your photographic talents that are more fun to talk about at cocktail parties — photographing celebrities for magazine covers, documenting the atrocities of war. Unlike the former, though, we do something that has inherent value from the start — you can make celebrity portraiture important, but it doesn’t start out that way. Does the world need another photo of Jack Nicholson grinning? War photography, ironically perhaps, is much closer to the give and take of a wedding, but there are far more pitfalls there than just getting shot. I like to use my life and my work to remember that as a people we do more than just shoot each other. We love and we laugh and we dance and we drink until maybe we regret the rest morning, but have memories and moments and connections that last us the rest of our lives. It’s life, but more so. Life is messy and chaotic and confuses the heck out of me sometimes, but that’s exactly what makes it beautiful. The unsurprised live is not worth living.

And it feels so good to take this chaotic world in through my viewfinder and make some sense of it — just enough order to be dynamic, to show the chaos and surprise pulsing against the composition and flow of a story. Moments just happen, but by the time we remember them they have become part of a story. We traffic in these memories, and shape them.

But it breaks down further. There’s something that feels so right about being good at something, about complicated tasks becoming part of your nature. There hadn’t been more than a few days in a row since March that I didn’t have my camera in my hand, and yet here I was after the holidays, after weeks of relative break and separation from my work. The camera was in my hand again and I felt whole. It was like looking down and realizing where you misplaced your kidneys. I compose photos as I look around, all of the settings and composition set before I raise the camera to my eye. I’ve developed a little shrug that, with almost no movement, can make a camera jump into my hands from its position hanging on either shoulder. I change settings as I walk, not looking down, not thinking. My thumb dances around the camera body, 1/250th becomes 1/80th, the ISO shoots up, the flash goes off, or back again, and I’m not thinking about this any more than I’m thinking about putting my right leg in front of my left. By the time I see the jumble of chaos resolve itself in my viewfinder, everything is the way I want it. It just makes sense.

And this is my life, because of you. Because of all of my amazing clients, because of my readers, because of my family, my friends, people who push me forward, who share in my joys when life is easy and keep me going when life is hard. You have gotten me here, and for you I’m going to do things in 2012 that will push it even harder. And for me, because that just makes sense.

This year we changed the formula and went to the group homes and private residences of some of those served, which took us to every corner of the Bronx, from Co-Op City to the neighborhoods rendered almost unlivable by the construction of the Cross-Bronx. I met kids and adults, clients and those helping them, who were funny, outgoing, ambitious (one member of a group home had logged 900 hours in culinary education!) but also with tales of the incredible costs of care, especially for conditions such as cerebral palsy.

I am saving the vast majority of the shoot for the fund-raising, but here is a taste.

I like to keep my work evolving, which means I go through a lot of equipment, and I leave a lot more in my wake behind me. This doesn’t work so well when you live in Manhattan, so I’m doing a summer house-cleaning sale on some equipment I have lying around. I want to be done with this and ship everything before I go to California next week, so even though the pieces retail for as much as $2,000, I’m putting them all on eBay starting at 99 cents, no reserve.

This is what’s called faith in the system.

I still have a few things I was on the fence about, but here’s what’s on the chopping block. Everything is described as honestly as I could in the listing:

Panasonic LX3


Nikon 35mm f/1.8G

Nikon 135mm f/2D DC

Lensbaby Control Freak

and … last but not least…

my Version 1 Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8.
Killing my children, but onward and upward….

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The good folks at PDN have published my work and interviewed me again with a nice update about the business side of gay marriage. I should have mentioned that I’m in Manhattan proper these days, not Westchester, and that I don’t know whether or not my phone has been ringing with gay-wedding inquiries because during peak season my assistant handles most of the initial inquiry e-mails, but it’s a great piece and I’m always happy to be featured there.

I try to maintain a “dinner-table atmosphere” in my public dealings these days. Growing up in an Irish family where no one was shy about voicing their opinion, you soon learned that there was lots of stuff you could talk about and have a grand ol’ time, even in your disagreements. Then there were things that would lead to anger and hurt feelings … and then there were things that would lead to conversational Armageddon (like making fun of the Jets). I have friends, family, and fantastic clients along all points of the political spectrum, and have always sought meaningful conversations instead of point-scoring, because let’s face it — talk to anyone long enough, and eventually they will say something that you think is downright looney-tunes. But I have never been shy about my belief that gay people should have the same rights and responsibilities as everyone else.

Or, in other words: Dear awesome gay couples. There is only one NYC photographer who has been featured for gay marriage in PDN and the American, international, and Japanese editions of Newsweek. Let me document your awesomeness.

Anyway, even though I tend to avoid controversial subjects, this is something that is not only near and dear to my heart, but central to what I do as a documentarian of people and relationships. While it doesn’t take the same sort of courage to be pro-gay marriage when you’re running a business out of Manhattan as it does in, say, Alabama, we are at a strange point where self-publishing photographers are minor-but-international public figures. Google Analytics tells me that one of my biggest fan bases is in Malaysia, for example, and one of my previous gay-marriage postings was viciously attacked by a government official from the Sudan.

When I first shot a gay wedding, I expected the experience to be similar to any other great wedding. There are slight differences in what sort of poses will look good, but that’s true from couple to couple as well. But there was an extra intensity to the emotion throughout the room, and I think I know why. I always try to let people’s history inform the shots I take. I fight for that perfect mother-son dance shot even if I’ve taken 200 before, because I know that she has spent decades thinking about just this moment. Well, for a while at least, when you shoot a gay wedding you are photographing people who grew up thinking that this whole wedding thing could never happen for them. That all the connection, the public displays, the meaningful vows, the celebrations, everything I adore about weddings — that these things could only happen to other people.

And then, finally, the doors opened to them.

That is what makes me an ardent supporter. That is why I’ve made sure to have a gay-wedding photo in my front-page portfolio ever since — because I’ve talked to gay couples about their shame and anger when they meet a photographer who photographs gay weddings but won’t display them proudly out of fear. Sometimes things are worth a little courage.

I was shooting a wedding when New York passed the gay marriage law. My fantastic (and gay) assistant Erica had been following the news closely, but while the state Senate was in deliberations, the reception was hopping like you’ve never seen, so we lost track. I mean, we’re talking three inches of wine sloshing on the floor and no one cared — I can’t wait to show it to you. When we got a quick break, I pulled her aside and said “Hey, what happened with the bill?”

She pulled out her Blackberry. “It passed. IT PASSED!” High fives and hugs. Thank God for autofocus, because her eyes filled with tears.

She tapped a gay couple on the shoulder. “It happened. Gay marriage is legal.”

They stared, “What … just now?” More celebration.

I mentioned it to another guest whose wedding I had photographed, and we high-fived. It spread like a ripple of excitement in an already raucous reception.

I don’t care about the politics. I don’t care about trying to score points and argue with someone who believes differently from me — my grandfather is one of my greatest role models and favorite people, and let’s just say he felt differently about the issue. What I care about is that feeling, that joy, that incredible connection. That is what I seek to capture and I’m so glad that so many more people can experience it now.

Whether it’s just the time I’ve put in or that, according to back-of-the-napkin calculations, I’ve crossed the threshold of taking more than a million photographs for professional jobs, I feel like I finally have reached a mature understanding of what I do as a photographer. It’s been a long process of simplification. When you start out, what you do, basically is point your camera at stuff, push a button and hope for the best, so you rattle everything that applies to: “I specialize in portraits and weddings and photojournalism and sunsets and flowers and families and dogs and babies and sports and travel and macro and did I mention sunsets?”

And then you look back and say, “What do I actually like? What am I actually good at? OK, maybe I do weddings with a photojournalistic aesthetic and portraits with a bias for dynamic light and emotions.” Or whatever.

But then you realize that’s both too complicated and too simple, and the real question as a long-term professional is what is it that beats through your heart? What keeps you going, keeps you from calcifying, keeps you from that death knell of photographic careers … déjà vu and boredom? A bored photographer is doomed for mediocrity or professional failure, and generally both. Why do you think wedding photography has such a high turnover rate? Too many people didn’t understand how to make their 100th or 1000th wedding as exciting as their first, how to keep pressing themselves forward when improvement is slower and harder than figuring out how your flash works.

Maybe that’s when you become an artist, and keep chasing your aesthetic down the rabbit hole. But I don’t know much about that. Too subjective. Once you take a photo, in my opinion, you are merely the first viewer of it. Your opinion about whether it is art or good is no more important than anyone else’s, except if it makes you happy or excited. But I know what I can do: Tell stories and solve problems. Simple as that, but also complicated and challenging and exciting to keep my blood pumping until I can’t hold a camera any longer.

Here I faced a problem long familiar to me from my days as a photographer for Columbia University — how do you take a bunch of people sitting around a conference table and photograph them in a way that’s in any way as visually exciting as the words they are saying? You could go down the artistic rabbit hole (“I call this set … “All Of Your Ankles”), but that’s not a great way to serve your clients. Here I solved the problem as simply as possible but no simpler. I put an SB-900 on each side of the room, bouncing toward the wall and ceiling, but close to it, so the light surface isn’t as huge as your traditional bounce. That allowed me to get the contrast and clarity I wanted wherever I stood with my 70-200, lighting what I wanted enough to bring out the reflections, and not lighting a distracting background. Even the water glasses — the bane of event shooters everywhere, serve a purpose with crispness and perspective, and setting the scene with a handy logo.

It’s not a fantastic wedding in Aruba (keep an eye out in November for that), but it keeps my brain churning with “How can I solve this problem better?” And that’s always exciting to me.
—
Lens: Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 VR II
Camera: Nikon D3s

Now, I finally strapped on a camera and headed for Ground Zero, but I was met with a site of raucous celebration, not despair. Osama is dead; we even have the body so there won’t be Osama sighting for the next 50 years, and New Yorkers were in the mood to celebrate. Given that it was 1 a.m., most of the ones really ready to celebrate in public were the college kids who were ready to go anyway, which ensured the atmosphere would be of revelry, not contemplation, though we were among the graves of Osama victims.

But if any city is ready for an impromptu rally at 1 a.m., it’s this one. And I’m glad to call it my home.

UPDATE: I wasn’t there to do video, but here’s a quick one I took to just get a sense of the crowd. Also, my friends at B&H Photo asked how I did this technically, given that it was 1 a.m. under low and very tricky lighting. Images have very little editing as befits photojournalism, but I knew I’d have to capture action in near-darkness, so I brought my “night vision” set-up: Two Nikon D3s‘s with the Nikon 24mm f/1.4, 35mm f/1.4, and Sigma 85mm f/1.4. Under sodium-vapor streetlights, white balance gets truly wacky, so I used Nikon Capture NX2 to process, as it has the best white balance control of any program I’ve used.

Otherwise, the main skills were things I learned in years as a newspaper photographer, such as how to politely elbow your way through a surging crowd and get where the action is.

Students, including a girl on her 21st birthday, use street poles to show their patriotism.

Revelers spray champagne onto the crowds below

After spraying the crowd, he enjoys some of the champagne for himself

Who knew New Yorkers had so many spare flags?

And the crowd goes wild for the cameras

A woman walks past a one-man candlelight vigil

Nothing says pride like face paint

The crowd chants for peace

Marching past the 9/11 memorial

Scaling Mount Patriotism…

“Lady, do NOT go up there! You are wearing a DRESS!”

City worker takes it in…

Moments like these are more important than car hoods

The only time I have ever seen a New Yorker happy to be stuck in traffic.

The sign of the night…

Let your colonial flag fly…

Tossed toilet paper hangs above as the crowd surges

Texting in the USA…

I can’t get enough of these guys.

Carried above the crowd

Vigilant.

UPDATE: There’s a lot going on in the comments, some of it I find quite distasteful. Here’s my view as someone who was there, in it if not of it:

I would prefer Osama have come quietly, but, he didn’t. I don’t really trust these events to be related truthfully given the value of propaganda, but the whole “firing back and using a wife as a human shield” thing, if true, makes me pretty comfortable with their decision to fire back.

In short, Americans aren’t particularly obsessed with death — we’re absolutely obsessed with WINNING. And in asymmetric warfare, the events of May 1, whether he had come quietly or not, is as close to a win as we can possibly come.

This story, about Japanese earthquake survivors looking for their photos of friends and family, got me thinking. I try to remember the inherent importance of what I do, of why I’d rather shoot a wedding than spend all day shooting rockstars and celebrities, and it comes down to this — I have a lot of photos. I’m performing a catalog sync right now on 200,000 photos from last year. But there are some photos that are actual treasures to me, some that I would throw all my camera gear away just to save a single one. All of these are of moments with people that I can never get back, but when I I look at the photo, I remember them, and I remember how I felt. They’re treasures, and if I can create at least one photo at a wedding that would make my clients feel the same way, then I’ve done my job.

I’ve seen this sad story before. The only place I’ve lived outside New York state was New Orleans — I’ve traveled back and forth there so many times over the years that it felt like a second home, and so Hurricane Katrina brought a personal sense of shock. I did a number of stories about people who had taken up refuge in New York, and I went down as soon as I could to survey the city and work with the people putting it back together. In particular, I remember every word of what a principal in a Jefferson County parish school said to me:

“People around the country and the world have been wonderful — they’ve sent us so much help. They’ve sent blood, they’ve sent food, they’ve sent clothing. But we don’t need blood or food now. Please, send cameras. All of these people, they’ve lost their homes, but it’s even worse because they’ve all lost their photos. They’ve lost their history, their memories — and it’s devastating them. They can get a new home, but now they have to start piecing their history back together. Send cameras.”

Please allow me a moment of tourist photography here. Wendy and I went down to Atlanta for about 36 hours in a quick “before the insanity comes” getaway. While the goal of finding some warmer weather utterly fell to 35-degree mornings, we did have an amazing time swimming in this very tank, including whale sharks, the largest fish in the world. There also was a Hammerhead in the tank that came awfully close, but we were promised it wouldn’t eat us … much.
—
Lens: 35mm f/1.4
Camera: Nikon D3s

Thanks to the magic of scheduled posts, if all has gone well I should at this very moment be taking off from La Guardia airport, bound for San Antonio, where I will be the first speaker at the 2010 Digital Wedding Forum Convention!

The last time I was in San Antonio was on a magazine assignment, writing and photographing the remarkable Maybelle Montgomery, who was 109 years old at the time — born before J. Edgar Hoover and Buster Keaton! She had retired in 1945. She came from another world — half of the things she loved to do in her youth are impossible now — visiting the old Penn Station and the Battery Park Aquarium, climbing into the torch of the Statue of Liberty and watch immigrants stream into Ellis Island, among others.

I carted studio lights and a softbox all the way down there, and then made the wise decision that she would be far too bothered by the bright lights. Sadly Maybelle is no longer with us, but she lived a fuller life than most of us ever will.

Lens: Sigma 30mm f/1.4
Camera: Nikon D2X

Tuscany is as gorgeous as you’d think. This is basically straight out-of-camera; that’s just how it looked.

You can always count on the Adirondacks for a White Christmas. I’m spending Christmas Day the way I spent my year — travelling and processing photos, since there are some fantastic end-of-season weddings left to show you. 2010 was truly a fantastic year, blessed with a wonderful girlfriend, my fantastic friends and family, and sharing so much with so many wonderful clients. Also, I’m more than a little thankful that tomorrow I am headed to spend the New Year in Tuscany and Florence.

And there are good things to come in 2011, such as a big lecture at DWF in San Antonio, something fun I’m throwing together for WPPI in Las Vegas, and finally having time to do some personal work that I storyboarded way back in June.

Have a great rest of the year!

Wendy and I were in Boca Raton for a wedding, and, given how freezing it is in NYC these days, we wanted to take as much advantage of it as possible. So we went for a long, long walk along the beach, watching the sandpipers run along the waves, making up stories about the owners of the other footprints in the sand. It had been raining all morning, but that didn’t stop us. As we finally reached the point where we realized how far we’d walked, and that we’d have to walk all the way back, it started to rain a bit more, even though the sun was out.

“Look!” Wendy said. A rainbow seemingly began to grow out of the ocean. “I’ve never seen one right on the horizon before!” (We are not oceanfaring people).

It grew fast enough that you could follow its progress with your eye, first one band, and then a second. while behind us was a fantastic sunset.

You’d better believe we started shouting “What does this MEAN?”

And that’s why you always bring your camera with you. Regular ol’ panorama, 13 frames with the Nikon 35mm f/1.4.

My Aunt Lita took one of my favorite photos of the past couple years as my mother surprised me with birthday cake after Thanksgiving dinner:

Not the most flattering angle of me, and I was unshaven, full of turkey, etc., and of course taken with a point-and-shoot. But I love everything about it, because of how real the moment was to me. I didn’t even know the photo was being taken, or care. My family is very musical, while I am sort of a Bizarro anti-musician who destroys every note I come near. But they love me, so when my cousin and uncle started banging out the last few songs of the Beatles “Abbey Road” on the piano, no one ran off screaming as I joined in. It was fantastic. I don’t get to see my family very much because I live away and work such grueling and strange hours, and here was a moment of intense connection and joy. And then, right after the last bars of “Hery Majesty,” my cousin Jay seamlessly transitioned into Happy Birthday.

And I started singing it. For my uncle Jim, whose birthday was later that week. Quite honestly, I’ve been so busy that I kept forgetting that my birthday was coming up. But when my mother brought out German chocolate cake (my late father’s favorite and thus, of course, my favorite too), I realized that it was all planned for me. And I was overwhelmed. And FLASH went the camera.

Thank you Mom, and my family. And thank you, Aunt Lita, for being there, for the memory, and for another reminder why I do what I do.

But there is something harder than being a wedding photographer, and that’s being a wedding photographer’s significant other. They don’t get to temper the off-kilter work schedule with all of the incredible joys of sharing wedding days with amazing couples, or the honor of documenting so many amazing experiences. Poor Wendy did not need to look at her calendar to know that March was the last time we had spent a few consecutive days together. Does she sound patient and long-suffering? Well consider this — we started dating seriously in February. The woman is a saint.

So I blocked off this past weekend to bookings, and we headed up to the Hudson Valley to see the fall foliage and relax for a bit (even so, I processed an engagement shoot and ,ost of an amazing wedding you’ll see shortly). And it was incredible. First we stayed at the Mohonk Mountain House, an amazing resort that I knew from a wedding I shot there years ago. Absolutely gorgeous. We scrambled up a tricky mountain path called The Labyrinth to see a wide valley full of fiery foliage — and we liked it so much that we put the camera down and did it again for speed.

Next we stayed at the Cromwell Manor Inn, a charming bed and breakfast with an innkeeper filled with stories ranging from quaint to bawdy, and incredible, extravagant breakfasts. Certainly the first time I’ve had Basque cuisine at a B&B. With a hay ride, a trip to the Storm King Art Center, a few gallons of apple cider, and massages for the both of us, I’m renewed and ready to finish the season.

And I took some pictures.

“This is a 774!” I cried!

“I’m not sure sure about that, Ryan,” he said, pointing upward. “Look at the way the sun is catching those clouds. I think this is at least an 824.”

We had decided that there were exactly 1,000 sunsets, and that God and his angels put them on display for us, numerically ranking them according to how majestic they were, and it was our duty to catalog them. We did a pretty good job. I was fastidious about not ranking one sunset higher than another one I’d seen that had been even better. Beauty, I learned early, is contextualized.

It was cocktail hour at Lauren and John’s Battery Gardens wedding when the skies set themselves on fire. It started as a golden streak mixed with the rich blue, and grew more and more colorful and complicated by the minute. There seemed to be eight different types of cloud, all catching the sun in different ways.

I stopped, just to watch. Unless you’ve seen me in action at a wedding, you might not understand how shocking that is. I don’t stop at weddings. I’ve received devastating personal news at weddings and not stopped working, bobbing and weaving and looking for new angles. Later that night, my assistant literally had to chase me around the entire reception floor to give me back some memory cards he was backing up, because I was circling so fast.

I know that sunsets are pretty much the lowest-regarded form of art. I didn’t have anything to do with how nice it looked, after all — I just had a decent sense of composition and know how to get the right exposure. But more importantly it’s because my normal job is to take photos that look much better than reality does, but there was nothing I could do here to even match what I was seeing. After all, who knows how you’re viewing this? You could be cramming this slice of a sunset into your mobile phone screen. We had it spread out across the sky for us, morphing into different beauties over half an hour.

But if I can’t even allude to the best sunset I’ve ever seen, if I can’t share some pretty pictures because they’re disdained as fine art, then I have forgotten the joy of taking pictures in the first place. Or worse, I have forgotten the joy of seeing.

But my father made sure I never would.

… and this one doubly so.

I met Heather and Jordan for a very late-night engagement shoot at the swanky hotel where they got engaged. Unfortunately the floor they got engaged on was under construction, but I said “Hey, these elevators are pretty cool.” I usually try not to inconvenience anyone, but since the hotel was quiet at this time of night and there were two other elevators sitting unused, I hit all the buttons on the way down so we’d have time to set up a shot.

To get the ceiling lights and to not be in the reflection, I was crouched low to the right of the door, impossible to see until you came in. So we stopped at one of the floors and a guy walks in. “Woah, paparazzi!” he says. This is a pretty common joke people make when they see my giant camera, so I don’t think much of it. Then I look up at the guy to apologize.

It’s Dave Chappelle. And he thought I realliy was there for him. So he got doubly confused when I just kind of shrugged, apologized for hitting all the buttons, and went back to shooting Heather and Jordan.

“Man, I don’t need this…” he said, and got off at the next floor. He wasn’t really mad, but I think anyone would say that when they see two people making out on an elevator with a photographer and all of the buttons lit up.

Sorry, Dave.

P.S.: Dave has been working out. The guy was RIPPED.

Yes, Mr. Rogers. As I go forward in this industry, as, after 120 weddings or so, I can no longer see myself as a fresh young upstart, I’ve been thinking a lot about the focus of my photography, the meaning, the whys more than the hows — and it’s hard to think of a better role model than Fred McFeely Rogers.

Now, people familiar with my MacGuyver obsession may say that I was overly influenced by the television I grew up with, and you’re probably right, but hear me out. Fred Rogers was about as close as 20th Century America has to a living saint. He was one of the most famous people on the planet, but as far from a “rock star” as you could ever imagine. He lived simply, and he never lost sight of what his work was really about — primarily the education of children, but also imparting the central message that we are unique, and that our uniqueness is wonderful. And nothing got in his way — with kindness and determination, he saved public television and he saved the VCR, because they helped him do his work. If you have never seen the video of him testifying before Congress, watch it. It’s amazing — his earnestness and intelligence utterly melts away the cynicism of career politicians for one of the few times in recorded history.

He was the antithesis of cool. He was skinny and nerdy and drove an old car, and he wore the same sweater all the time. But cool didn’t matter — he had a job to do, and it was important. Watch his acceptance of a Lifetime Achievement Emmy. Watch him stand before a lot of cool people and remind them that there is something so important.

We are in the middle of a deeply weird change — wedding photography, the red-headed stepchild of artistic photography, is becoming cool. People want to do it, people look at you approvingly when you tell them that you do it for a living, heck, you aren’t even publicly shamed quite so much at art schools if you dabble in it. This is awesome, and amazing, and has opened up so many new possibilities for photography in the industry. But I always try to remind myself that what we do is more than cool. By documenting the one of the most important days in someone’s life, we are writing social history for our clients, for their friends, for their families.

I spend a lot of time at most weddings just looking for perfect expressions. These photos are rarely cool and virtually unpublishable — they don’t tell much of a story, they don’t help future brides plan their wedding, and they don’t really help other photographers learn how to take good pictures. But when a couple comes up to me and says “This is the first picture of my mother I’ve ever seen that actually looks like her!” I feel like just maybe I’ve done something important.

People let us in. At weddings, between the joy and the anxiety and sometimes the alcohol, the walls that we walk around with come crashing down. In many ways, people are most themselves. We have the opportunity to document their uniqueness, the way they express joy, and that is something I want to stay focused on. Beyond the cool portraits, the Brenizer methods and flash composites and jaw-droppingly expensive equipment, sometimes I take photos of people that look like who they are, and I love them.

As he said in his acceptance speech: “All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. … Think of the people who have helped you become who you are. Those who have cared about you and wanted what was best for you in life.” In other words, the people who we invite to share our wedding days. That is exactly the thing we have the power to document.

There’s no one way to do things. As I said, being super-cool has opened up so many new possibilities, allowing all sorts of couples to get photos that represent their style of expression. Be the Fonz of wedding photography, the Jack Kerouac, the Robert Capa, the Annie Liebowitz. I want to try to be more like the Fred Rogers.

On the plus side, when I return, I’ll be returning with a gorgeous Indian wedding. And as always previews from recent shoots are featured at my Facebook page, including a fun engagement shoot in Park Slope from Friday.

“>

I’ve already discussed how my job makes me feel creepy because it’s good to take interest in the way romance plays out in the real world. But there’s more. I have always had a strange sort of photographic memory (pun not intended). If I’ve taken your photo, ever, I remember your face. I remember that I’ve taken a photo looks. I remember what that photo looked like and the expression you were making. But I often will have no recollection of the context, when or where the event was taken. The problem comes from what happens when you’ve taken photos of literally tens of thousands of people — for years I couldn’t walk around the Columbia University area without constant bouts of deja vu as people walked by me.

And, of course, the creepiness. I was in a coffeeshop waiting for the couple for today’s engagement shoot, and I sat next to a young woman. My brow furrowed. Do I say it?

“There’s really no way for this not to sound terrible, but I’ve taken your picture somewhere. Did you go to Columbia?”

No, it turned out, but she was in Rebekah and Jonah’s Korean/Jewish extravaganza.

So how does it pay to be creepy, other than remembering a great day (that has an album coming up soon)? This sort of memory has always been a huge advantage for me as an event photographer. I like to try to get photos of as many guests as possible, and even in gigantic events I can always remember at a glance which guests I’ve gotten good photos of and which I haven’t, giving clients as robust coverage as possible. So I guess I’ll have to live with the deja vu.

It also says something interesting about the profound cognitive effect the process of taking photos and reviewing them can have, at least for me, since I do not have a particularly good memory for your face if I haven’t taken your photo.

Here’s another shot taken with my iPhone 3Gs on Jamaica. I’ve done a review of the HDR applications that made these shots possible over at Amazon’s End User blog. Check it out for my thoughts and more photos!

Here’s another shot from the Rockhouse Hotel in Jamaica. What’s special about this shot? It was taken with my iPhone and minimally edited in Photoshop. Not a bad little camera on the 3Gs if you get the most you can out of it. More on this soon.

An interesting thing happened the other day. I was on a forum where wedding photographers were talking about their favorite images from their own weddings. The vast majority of these were cute, quirky moments that captured the personality of beloved friends and families, not the amazing portraiture that we photographers tend to focus so much energy on. Now, I LOVE portraiture. I love bringing out the best in people, and I love showing people that yes, they CAN be photogenic. But my heart truly lies in the capture of moments. There are few greater compliments I can receive than one like these, from a recent couple: “This picture you took of my Mom laughing is the first picture I’ve ever seen that actually looks like her!”

Why is that? Part of it’s that I have a naturally quirky sense of humor, perhaps. Part of it is that I started out as a photojournalist. But the largest part, I think, is that I never for a second have to question the value of these types of photographs, because they are the ones that keep memories of my own father sharp and vibrant.

My sister just launched the Robert Brenizer Memorial, which is a brilliant way to use new technology to keep his memory alive. Dad would have loved it: I can’t count the times over the years that I have been thankful that he was a giant geek when it came to the latest and greatest gadgets. That meant that, although he died in 1987, we had not just countless hundreds of photos of him from the cameras he collected or encouraged my mother to buy, but hours and hours of VHS video of him from 1983 on, because he HAD to be the first one in town to get a VHS recorder, even though you literally had to carry the VCR around with you as you recorded on an incredibly cumbersome set-up.

Thanks, Dad.

I know I’m biased, but he truly was an extraordinary man, and is my constant role model for how to live a decent life. Consider this: In 3rd grade, I moved to a new school district after he, at age 46, had finished a military and business career and decided to be a high school physics teacher. When he heard that I was being picked on for being the new kid, he planned and got approval an assembly on the basics of physics that would make me look cool. Just think about that — not only did a guy who had been in a school district for a couple months get approval to launch his own school-wide assembly, his plan was to teach physics to 3rd-5th graders in ways that would make them think it was really exciting and cool, and it worked. He got his entire high school class to come in and act out different roles and skits, showing that they were also excited about physics, at least when it was in his hands.

He was brilliant. He was the kind of person who could read a series of books on home repair, and then help build a house from scratch. I can’t even pitch a proper tent. The angriest I ever saw him was the day of the Challenger explosion. I was home from school, and we were watching it together when it exploded. He had been nervous all morning because of the cold weather in Cape Canaveral, and as soon as the fact of the explosion sunk in he was yelling “It was TOO COLD! How could they do that?!?” Things that came to light only hours and days later — frozen o-rings, jargon the general public had never heard, were things that he guessed immediately. With years of experience as an Air Force instructor, he knew all about launch factors.

But the most shocking thing about that day, given how important it was, is how fuzzy my memory is of it. Was I home from school sick? I can’t remember. What were his exact words? I can’t remember. I remember the couch, and the TV, and how the importance of it all sunk in from his emotions, but after so many years I have nothing but vague impressions. Without photography and video, that’s all I’d be left with. And without photography that captured the way he acted, the way he moved through the world and cared for people, all I’d remember is what he looked like when he was looking at a camera, not who he was.

Thanks, sis, for the memorial site. It’s perfect.

One of the attendees of my workshop told me this little anecdote that I absolutely loved. A friend of his is a teacher at a high school, and asked her students one simple question: “Can you name any photographer, living or dead?”

Silence. One student picked out a business card someone had given him and read the name off it.

If that doesn’t sink in, let me put it another way: In American culture, “The Situation” from Jersey Shore is way more famous than any photographer in history. Let that sink in for a bit.

At best, this entire industry has one rock star (Annie Liebowitz). Also, one classic pop diva ignored by the hip young masses (Anne Geddes). And I’ll give you Ryan McGinley as an indie hit.

There are a lot of things to take away from this — yes, you can bemoan a lack of education in the arts. But I LOVE it. Photographers aren’t important — their work is. Honestly, I couldn’t pick Richard Avedon, Alfred Stiglitz, or even modern masters like Steve McCurry out of a line-up — but I know their work inside and out. The Internet makes everything personal, turns everything into self-publishing, making the individual more important. It opens new opportunities, but it can get things twisted around.

Why does this get under my skin? It’s not a matter of individual behavior — most really well-known wedding photographers are the nicest people you could hope to meet. And, as the ad above shows, lots of industries have “rock stars.”

It’s all about what people aspire to. Is what really drives you to become more and more famous, or to do better and better work? Maybe fame is simply supplanting money as a form of currency — there have always been people out simply to get rich — but the central problem is that I believe that what wedding photographers do is more important than what many rock stars or celebrities do.

We aren’t important, but our work is. Love what you do and do it well, and you will spend a lifetime crafting the memories and social histories of people on the most important days of their lives. You will take photos that make children gape in amazement that their parents were so beautiful, you will take photos that will be laid with people in their caskets, you will take photos that can make people cry even if they don’t know the people in them.

Is that really less important than being the drummer for Nickelback?

UPDATE: Mark leaves a fantastic story in the comments: “I teach a HS class in photography. When I asked my kids to name one photographer they all said Ashton Kutcher. Then they saw a grown man cry!”