Just One More Moment- A Photographer's Drive

As a photographer I’m in the business of capturing moments. This is what drives me every day. Knowing I’m making families precious treasures to mark some of the brief, fleeting, beautiful moments in their lives.

Enjoy the Magic

I’m thinking about this because we were listening to the astronomer Brian Cox on the radio on the way home from the studio the other night. He was talking about just this, how our lives are a finite series of little moments. He’d recently heard a story of a father who had built a den in the woods with his son, when they’d gone back to look at it, it had all fallen down. The father had said ‘shall we build it again’ and the son had said ‘Yeh, but not today Dad’. The son was growing into a teenager, and the father wanted just one more day of childhood play, and den building magic before all that was gone forever.

Realising Mortality

My nine year old daughter’s guinea pig recently died. The experience has opened the mortality floodgates of her mind. We’ve had a lot of deep conversations since his loss, and a lot of tears, talking about how we all will one day die. We’ve talked about how I will die at some point, and that has given me the opportunity to let her know that should that happen, everything will be ok.

Last night her tears were for her own death, that she was picturing many years from now, and her great concern was that no one who loved her would be left to miss her! I pointed out that she would very probably have children or grandchildren of her own and they would be very sad. This was some comfort to her.

Finite Time

Back to Brian, he also talked about how special and beautiful it is that our time here is finite. And I’m with him there, my own experiences of loss have shaped my whole outlook on life and given me the confidence and driving force to create PhotoBaby.