It didn’t start with a camera. It started with a glass of wine I didn’t want to rush.
I can’t tell you which glass it was anymore. What I do remember is the moment I realized wine was teaching me how to look. Not at the wine itself, but at everything around it. The light catching the glass. The way a cork balanced on the rim of the bottle, just barely intact. The color of a red held against a window, which tells you nothing about how it tastes.
Photography grew out of that. Not as a career or a craft. More like a reflex.
What Draws Me In
What pulls me toward a photograph is the same thing that pulls me toward a glass. Small, specific details that say something about a larger whole. A portrait isn’t a record of a face. It’s the moment someone forgets themselves, or decides not to. A landscape isn’t a document of a place. It’s my reading of what I saw, right then.
Wine works the same way. Two people drinking from one bottle don’t taste the same thing. That isn’t a flaw in the system. That is the system.
The Habit
Photography and wine share one thing. The best moments rarely show up when you’re in a hurry. You can make a technically correct photo in a fraction of a second, but a good one asks for more. You wait. You move around. You come back later.
I shoot portraits, wine, landscape, and reportage. Four genres that look unrelated at first. Still, the question I ask myself is the same every time: what do I want the viewer to see, and what do I want them to find on their own?
Getting that balance right is the hard part. It’s also what keeps me interested.
Looking closely is something you train. I caught myself at it again last week. A glass of white held against the light, the bubbles clinging along the side. I didn’t have my camera with me, so I got up to fetch it.