If at the end of your life

Mike_E · Oct 30, 2007

If at the end of your life you had to pick one photo -and just for the sake of discussion you can pick one that you would have liked to have taken- that you had taken and describe to your nearest and dearest why it was your favorite, what would the photo be of and why would it be your favorite?

This is a simple question (asked in my own convoluted way) and there are no tricks or hidden meanings, I would just like to know.

So that I do not skew the discussion or the answers, please allow me to give my example a little latter.

Thanks in advance,

mike

Garbz · Oct 30, 2007

Well bearing in mind that since I am 23 I expect my life has a lot more photos before it will end, currently it's this one.

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1080/1272780397_01aaa49c70_b.jpg

It has it all. It shows a wonderful astronomical even. It looks good. It shows where I live and grew up. It was taken from a cliff where I spent my free time climbing. It shows the entire 150minute cycle of totality and thus that for once in my life I took the time to sit with a camera and a case of beer and do something right.

Plus people keep telling me it's a damn fine picture

Battou · Oct 31, 2007

At twenty six I feel the same as Garbz, but at current it's this

http://www.photo-lucidity.com/pic-66.html

I would have liked to have been responsible for that, The relationship of youth and age is there, but I live on a Indian reservation, A highly matriarchal society. I look as this and see a clan mother looking at the future of her people, knowing the hardships she herself has faced and seeing that they as a society will continue long after she has passed.

Iron Flatline · Oct 31, 2007

I haven't taken it yet. As to other people's work, nothing comes to mind. I would want it to be my own.

Sw1tchFX · Oct 31, 2007

My best photo will be the one I shoot tomorrow.

I'm only 19, only been doing this for about 3 years and I don't think i'm ready to answer a question like this.

tbsdphotog · Oct 31, 2007

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3842331/

I would have liked to be the one who took this photo. It is not happy so be prepared( some might call it disturbing). The sheer emotion that this photo captures seems to leak from the film. I can feel the humanity in the womans face. I can see her pain.Her pain is turned into something tangiable, that we can see and touch. To me this image is what photography is all about. Capturing things that make us human: emotion, perception, and creativity.

pandinus · Oct 31, 2007

I must admit that as at 26 years, I've a lot of time left. Bouth for shooting photos and for seeing the world.
How ever, at pressent I'd have to say this one: http://www.trekearth.com/viewphotos.php?l=7&p=401817

The reason for it is quite simply the mood that I captured when shooting this. I grew up allong the sea, I've lived my whole life close to the sea and so nothing is more natural to me than the moods that are created close to the water. Wether it be a lonely boat left on shore to wither away in the fog like this. Or a young couple viewing the sunset and enjoying eachothers company... Capturing images of the coast line where I grew up has been a passion, and once in a while I capture images like this one.

abraxas · Oct 31, 2007

I'm 54 and a few more seconds closer to dropping dead than I was when I hit "reply." tick-tock-tick-tock... I got nothing in particular. Maybe the next shot?

chris_arnet · Oct 31, 2007

i havnt taken it yet. i'll let you know when i do.

kundalini · Oct 31, 2007

I'm 50, near enough anyway, and I haven't taken that one yet. However, there are a few that mean a lot to me. One that I took of my future ex-wife in particular. We met as friends and ended as friends, no dramas. At 38, she had never been on a roller coaster (yes, she was much younger than I). This is not a particularly great photo, taken with a little P&S, but the look on her face says it all.

I have another, but can't find it now. All you young whippersnappers earlier in this post take note. Tomorrow you'll be thirty. Next week forty. Next month you'll try to fart and $h1+ yourself instead. Live life.

Mike_E · Nov 2, 2007

Sorry to take so long getting back to this, life is intrusive.

I started this thread thinking that I would like to begin a project and wouldn't like for it to be a waste of time. So, which better way to decide on something than to first decide what is really important to me.

There was also a bit of hope that some of you might want to reminisce about projects that you had started.

I'm still undecided but knowing that I am a creature of the light I believe that I should be looking towards expressing visions of illumination.

If anyone would like to chime in about projects that you've started, please do as I would really like to hear them.

mike

dpolston · Nov 2, 2007

I hope to have several but I think I would have to pick categories.

The one I cherish the most, I will need to hunt for. It's of my wife (then girlfriend - we were around 16 years old) and I took a photo of her walking away from me (around 60 yards away). She was balancing herself on some landscape timbers and had both arms out steadying herself.

That was the photo that changed the way I looked at photographs. That single shot that I took made me want to become a photographer. I knew that if I could give other people the chance to relive the moments in their lives like I remember that photo, I could make that memory immortal.

That photo was by all standards of photography a bad print. Over exposed a bit, a little grainy, right in the middle of the frame (the rules of thirds went right out the window) but there isn't enough money in the world to buy it from me.

The others would have to be my kids. There are too many of those to choose from.

The most powerful photo I have taken IMO has to be the one linked below. It is of the OK city bombing site. It was bitter cold the day I went there and to be brutally honest, although I "got it" [the emotion of the hallowed ground of the bombing site] I was more or less emotionally removed from the devastation because it didn't effect me; "I didn't know anyone who was killed there". So, I took about a hundred snapshots; of the walls, the golden chairs, etc; but as I was leaving, I turned around and took this photo. That moment is when it "hit me like a ton of bricks". The things hung on these fences represent lives and what they meant to family after family.

It's not the photo for me... it's the story. All you have to do is open it up; click it on your computer, it'll get bigger. Hopefully, you'll get it too.

http://davidpolston.blogspot.com/2007/08/mementos.html

gomexz · Nov 2, 2007

Im new to the game however one of my fav pics is a pic i came up with and asked a friend to take. I just really love this pic.

http://rootadminister.googlepages.com/meandtree.jpg

by the way thats me.

Mike_E · Nov 3, 2007

dpolston said:
I hope to have several but I think I would have to pick categories.

The one I cherish the most, I will need to hunt for. It's of my wife (then girlfriend - we were around 16 years old) and I took a photo of her walking away from me (around 60 yards away). She was balancing herself on some landscape timbers and had both arms out steadying herself.

That was the photo that changed the way I looked at photographs. That single shot that I took made me want to become a photographer. I knew that if I could give other people the chance to relive the moments in their lives like I remember that photo, I could make that memory immortal.

That photo was by all standards of photography a bad print. Over exposed a bit, a little grainy, right in the middle of the frame (the rules of thirds went right out the window) but there isn't enough money in the world to buy it from me.

The others would have to be my kids. There are too many of those to choose from.

The most powerful photo I have taken IMO has to be the one linked below. It is of the OK city bombing site. It was bitter cold the day I went there and to be brutally honest, although I "got it" [the emotion of the hallowed ground of the bombing site] I was more or less emotionally removed from the devastation because it didn't effect me; "I didn't know anyone who was killed there". So, I took about a hundred snapshots; of the walls, the golden chairs, etc; but as I was leaving, I turned around and took this photo. That moment is when it "hit me like a ton of bricks". The things hung on these fences represent lives and what they meant to family after family.

It's not the photo for me... it's the story. All you have to do is open it up; click it on your computer, it'll get bigger. Hopefully, you'll get it too.

http://davidpolston.blogspot.com/2007/08/mementos.html