Why Reality Matters.
These days, a prompt can generate a beautiful image before you’ve finished your coffee. It’s impressive.
It can also do it without getting up at dawn, lugging 20kg of gear to a shoot, then having to tell the client the sun went home for the day. It’ll never stand in the rain, wondering if the weather forecast was written by a comedian. The lucky thing.
Photographers are a strange bunch.
We’ll drive six hours for a cloud, or spend three hours moving a reflection three millimeters. We get up at 4am for a sunrise - then spend the next week complaining we should have arrived half an hour earlier. We travel across the world for a photograph, then crop half of it out. None of this seems entirely rational… until you see the photograph.
Reality is gloriously difficult. It often ignores the brief, changes the light, and puts the bird on the wrong branch. It never waits for you to change lenses.
Good. Imagine if it didn’t.
Reality has never tried to look convincing, because it doesn’t have to.
The best photographers know something everyone else eventually discovers: reality always gets the final say. We spend years learning how to work with it instead. Preparing, waiting, noticing. And, every now and then, reality does something extraordinary. And because we were there, so is everyone else.
The more convincing imitations become, the more valuable reality feels. It has one unfair advantage: it actually happened.
Beautiful images have become easy. Fortunately, photographs haven’t.
So, here’s to reality. May it always surprise us.
Signed,
The humans of Progear Photographic