World Photography Day: 980,000 Pictures and Counting

The Day Photography Became Everyone’s

World Photography Day is August 19, and the date is exact for a reason. On that day in 1839, the French government purchased the patent for the daguerreotype process and declared it a gift, free to the world. That is the moment photography stopped being a private experiment and became something the public could use.

The daguerreotype came from Louis Daguerre, building on work by Joseph Niépce. It captured a sharp, permanent image on a silver-coated copper plate, and it was a marvel, though it took a heavy kit of plates and chemicals and a subject who could hold still for a long time. Decades later, George Eastman put photography in everyone’s hands for real. He swapped the copper plate for film, and in 1888 he released the Kodak camera with the slogan that you press the button and they do the rest. From there it ran all the way to the phone in your pocket. The first formal World Photography Day was held in 2010, when photographers from over a hundred countries shared images in a single online gallery.

That is the history. Here is why the day means something to me personally.

A Cheap Camera and an Addiction

In the late 1980s, a girlfriend gave me a camera. It was a cheap little film camera, nothing special. It changed my life anyway.

I got addicted almost immediately. I started photographing everything in reach, flowers, birds, bees, bugs, whatever piece of nature held still long enough. I shot constantly. There is a particular hook that gets into you when you start really looking at the world through a lens, and it got into me fast. You stop walking past things. You start seeing light and shape and the moment a bee lands on a flower, and you want to catch it.

Then life happened. I got married, and the camera got set aside. It mostly sat in a drawer for a long stretch, the way hobbies do when other things take over.

Coming Back to It

After my wife Claudia passed away in January 2005, I picked the camera back up. I will not pretend that was a small thing. The day after she died, I drove out to Joshua Tree and sat on Skull Rock for hours, and somewhere in there the camera became the thing that pulled me back into the world. I tell that whole story in my memoir, Adventures of a Belly Dance Photographer, in chapters like Queen of Angels and The Day Everything Changed. Photography gave me a reason to go outside and pay attention to the world again, one frame at a time.

From there it grew. I got a new camera, then another, then another, each one progressively bigger and more capable. I went from backyard nature photography to chasing subjects all over the place. And the subjects got a lot more interesting than flowers.

Everything in Front of the Lens

Once the obsession had me, I pointed the lens at everything. Nature first, then Renaissance fairs, which became a whole world of their own for me. Belly dancers. Professional wrestling matches, back when it was still WWF. Reenactments of World War Two and the Civil War, with the smoke and the gear and the noise.

The circus was a favorite. I used to get VIP tickets, which put me on a little moving stand right in the center ring while the show happened around me. You do not see the circus from there the way the crowd does. You are inside it.

I also did credentialed work. I was the photographer for Trader Joe’s at the Rose Parade in Pasadena. Every year I went out for it, and the job came with two tickets, so every year I brought along a friend and we stood there shivering together at four in the morning, because it gets genuinely cold in Pasadena before dawn. I was the official photographer for the Irwindale Renaissance Faire a couple of times and several other fairs, and I shot the Arizona Renaissance Festival many times over. The camera was my pass into places I would never have stood otherwise.

All of it adds up. My photo archive now holds around 980,000 pictures. Almost a million frames, going back to that cheap camera in the late eighties.

Learning to Catch the Moment

Shooting that many different subjects teaches you something you cannot learn any other way. Each one demands a different kind of patience and a different eye.

Nature makes you wait. A bird does what it wants, and you hold still until it does the thing you came for. Belly dancers and wrestlers are the opposite, fast and constant, and you learn to anticipate the peak of a movement and fire a half second before it happens, because if you wait until you see it, you have already missed it. Reenactments give you smoke and chaos and a hundred things happening at once, and you train your eye to find the one face or gesture that tells the whole story inside the noise. The circus from the center ring is a flood of color and motion, and the skill is knowing where to point before the action arrives.

Every one of those subjects sharpened the same instinct, the ability to see the decisive moment coming and be ready for it. That instinct is the heart of photography. The famous shot is almost never luck. It is preparation meeting timing, the photographer who knew the moment was coming and was already in position when it did. You miss a thousand frames to get the one. After enough of them, the seeing becomes automatic, and that is when the work gets good.

What Photography Taught Me About Writing

Here is the part that matters for anyone who works with words. Photography and writing are the same skill pointed at different tools. Both are about seeing.

A good photograph is about what you choose to leave out of the frame as much as what you put in. You point the lens, and the edges of the picture do as much work as the center. Writing is identical. A good scene is built on the few details you choose to include and the hundred you leave out. The photographer who tries to fit everything into one frame gets a cluttered mess. The writer who describes every detail of a room buries the one detail that matters. Both crafts are subtraction.

Photography also trained my eye for the telling detail. After a few hundred thousand frames, you learn that the picture is rarely the obvious wide shot. It is the small thing, the hand, the expression, the object on the table, that tells the whole story. That is exactly what good prose does. It picks the one concrete detail that carries the meaning and trusts the reader to feel the rest. I learned that behind a camera before I ever learned it at a keyboard.

So on August 19, take a picture of something. Anything. Pay attention to what you frame and what you cut. You will be practicing the same thing every good writer practices, the art of choosing what matters and leaving the rest out.

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