A confession, which is somewhat sad, and more than somewhat true: When I’ve got my camera, I constantly look for beauty — in a bride’s anxious smile, in a sweeping landscape. When I don’t have my camera, I often forget to actively look.

But a sunset will always halt me in my tracks. So will a burst of golden light streaming through a cluster of leaves. And I’ve realized that over the summer, I’ve started seeing the world — almost all the time — as if I were looking through my lens. I can’t drive down a sun-dappled street anymore without thinking about where I would position a couple if this were the location for our portrait session, or what angle I would take if I wanted to get a picture of a specific tree. I can’t drive past the newly-blooming purple shrubs in my neighborhood without heading right back out with my camera, determined to grab a piece of that beauty before the purple fades away.

While that seems to mean work is always on my mind, I can’t say the side effects are a bad thing. When I’m looking through my lens, I really concentrate on what I’m seeing instead of just making sure I won’t trip on something or walk off the sidewalk. So with this non-stop through-the-lens vision, even when I’m not actively looking for beauty in the world around me, my camera has trained me to not be able to not notice it. (Like the double negative? I did.) I notice the light. I notice the colors. I notice the shadows, the shapes, the empty space and the textures.

And thank goodness. Who would want to miss a single moment like this?

~ Laura