The other day I read a blog by this girl from NYC. I didn't really read much of it actually, it was more a photographic breakdown of her life. Actually, not even that. Just photo after photo of sheer and utter beauty. Each photo was just filled with beauty and emotion and it really hit me. They're the kind of photos I want to take but just can't somehow. Glare in the lens, sun ghosting the film, summer and light. People tell me I take beautiful pictures but somehow I don't quite believe them.

I've made a promise to myself to write here and post at least one picture of mine a day. Some of them will be old pictures and some of them will be new. My life is photographs so it seems fitting to document it through photographs.

Now comes the challenge of deciding which picture to post first. It's sort of like the opening line of a book where you decide if you want to read it or not. This photo will be like the opening line of my book and will make you decide whether or not you want to carry on looking or just hit that little back button up there in the top left of your browser. Maybe it doesn't even matter if you carry on reading. One picture will have been enough to alter the course of your life for all of time. Two pictures doesn't alter it any more or any less, it's just another fork in the road where you go either one way or the other.

This is my first picture. This is the closest I've ever got to beauty in an image I think, beauty in the way I meant it. The way the sun catches the bubbles, the sun catching the red hair, the blue sky behind her, the silhouette caught in the sun, this is beauty to me. Not quite yet though. It's not perfect yet. I haven't yet found beauty in my pictures. Maybe it's a flaw in myself and maybe I'll never find perfection in my own work. That's quite possible actually. Ah well. I can still strive for it. I can still wonder at beauty in the work of those around me.

The American Dream, for me, is something quite different than it is to most. The American Dream, for me, is long, yellowy summer evenings where sundust dances in the light and the world is orange. It is in this dream that perfection can be found and I don't think I can find it in grey England. Australia would work too. I read somewhere that a photographer can never take brilliant photographs in his home country. He needs to emigrate overseas and to remove himself from what he finds normal to see the things that he misses in his home land. I've seen amazing photos taken in this country but I don't think I can take them. Maybe this is an excuse for what I find to lack in my work and maybe I'll find myself forever chasing the foreign dream, forever striving for something I'll never be able to capture. Maybe.

I found another one of mine that's almost perfect but not quite. Maybe.
That's it for today I think. I might add some more later.