I'll get it next time...

That is something I always find myself telling myself, when I'm too lazy to take a picture at the moment. It's something that I'm always struggling with.

This morning while I was getting ready to leave the house I looked out into the backyard, and saw this amazing scene before me. There was lots of moisture from steady drizzle the past few days, so this morning there was a lot of fog. It wasn't just that thick fog that blankets everything either...it was that dramatic type of fog that you always see in the best pictures. The rolling fog that affects light in a way that only it can. So, as I said, I looked out my slider doors into the backyard, and witnessed this awesome scene of the fog rolling across the mountains in the back, and wrapping around these old tankers from a long abandoned railroad line, and I found myself saying aloud "Eh, I'll get it next time...". And I actually stopped and mentally reprimanded myself because there IS no next time, there never is.

In photography, and in any other art form actually, the moments you capture are one of a kind. This world is constantly changing, moving, evolving, devolving...So even if all factors come together again in the future, so be almost the same in your eyes as the original moment, it never is EXACTLY the same...something is always different. In my case, the fog will never be exactly as it was, the light will never be exactly as it was, and other factors within the scene may never be as it was. So I had to remind myself that as a photographer it was my obligation to capture these moments as I see them, to truly capture the feeling and the vision I had at that time. Not tomorrow, not next week, or when I so happen to notice something similar again...but, NOW.

It all ties in with what I was talking about earlier, how photography is more than just taking pictures for me, it's a tool to help myself become a better person as well, and this is one of those instances. Just like in this scenario, it is important for everyone to capture their figurative "scene" now, instead of pushing it back. Go after the things that make us happy now, not later, because later may never be. We owe it to ourselves to live out "carpe diem".