We are engaged in one of the creative arts, and change and experimentation are necessary companions to this process. Creativity requires us to explore uncharted waters, both within ourselves and outside of ourselves, otherwise creativity is stifled.

Philosophically speaking, 'Time' and 'Instant' are extremely meaningful in an image - the image fights change in this regard in that the image represents a frozen moment in time, never to be replicated. An image documents a 1/125th of a second that once existed and it continues to represent that even after the subject itself is gone. These are relics, if you will, ones that tell us that, yes, we were there! It was real.

I see photography as being all about change. Because when you reflect on things, on images taken over time especially, change is explicit in them. A changed mood, a changed body, a changed landscape, a changed society. These things are important mileposts for us and they tell us things about ourselves, about where we have come from, even about where we are going.

To get fixed on NOT CHANGING is ridicuous. Many cells in your body are undergoing change and replenishment as we speak. Indeed, biologically, within the course of a single year your entire body's collective of cells are new cells save for a few. Yet we retain our familiar shape and face and emotional presence in the face of that dramatically changing biology.

So many things serve to capture the photographer's eye or jog his or her memory, even as they arouse tenderness or consternation, or admiration. What we capture on film is already filtered by what we, the photographer, was feeling and seeing at the time that the shutter button was pressed. When we later explore that image we see things that conflict with the vision that we had, and voila! we remove them. This is not a contradiction. It is the photographer's creative effort to seek some synergy between what he or she saw and what the OUTCOME on film reflects.

Even in documentary or news photography what the photographer 'sees' is a mere fragment of the scene at hand. The photographer makes decisions instantly to focus on this or on that, or to enhance this or that subject by the lens in use at the time. If we want to represent distance and wholeness we reach for our wide-angle lens. If we want to portray a sense of urgency we try to capture motion, the moment as it was happening. If our goal is to capture intimacy we reach for yet another kind of lens.

I think that photojournalism has helped to make the scene more explicitly real than it is. In a war, for example, a photographer has many directions to choose from; he or she could show the Marine lending a helping hand to a small child; he or she could show the pain of agony on an Iraqi face; or the utter destruction from a bomb; the flowers that still wave in the wind despite the chaos around.

These things are choices that we make, they do not explicitly reflect an accurate scene. They show our, the photographer's, inclination or world view. If I were in a war scene I would try to capture the human side of the war, not the technological power. You would do something different still. That is the way it is with photography, it is another way for each of us to continue communicating with the world around us.

A view of the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, DC The above image was made with a 16mm fisheye lens to portray the wall of names as if it were the earth which is home to all of us, regardless of our country of origin.

What is missing from photography today, especially when you look at all the equipment-driven magazines and ezines out there, is a sense of the person behind the lens. This is what photography is all about, not the equipment that they yield. The equipment, like the painter's brushes, offers solutions, options, that allow the photographer to represent their vision.

I sleep better at night knowing that I have so many wonderous tools at hand for communication purposes!