THE LIGHT OF LIFE by THE PORTUGAL BAPTISM PHOTOGRAPHER
The fascination with light. What can we find between a baby being baptized and a …baptism photographer? When the photographer picks up his cameras whether, for work or simply for the pleasure of stealing from the open nature some copies that he finds interesting for content, aesthetics, or mere experimentation, there is something that, without it, none of his intentions were possible.
The light.
It is it that lends the necessary photons so that, today, the sensor of his camera is stimulated to transform those strings of light to zeros and ones that will be retransformed, again, in light and stimulate our eyes and we will call it photography.
Without it, the light, the photographer will never achieve his goals because, she is the empress when shaping forms, building middle tones, creating contrasts, and, according to the sensitivity of the photographer, framing and composing those shapes transforming them into a two-dimensional surface that we will call it photography.
So, the photographer is someone who is always in a state of euphoria, chasing those little strings of light, sometimes closer to each other, sometimes more intense, sometimes more subtle, sometimes harsher or softer, and entertaining themselves to offer to the wedding photographer all sort of color gradations, tones, and textures that led him, sometimes, ecstatic and there is nothing more that may interest him.
His problem, even the baptism photographer, is that he does not always find the best way it falls on what it illuminate and serves the best interest and purpose of it, maybe because she likes to play with the photographer and difficult his job. Not everything can be easy.
There, like a craftsman, the photographer must learn how to overcome and solve things in a way that the light, the point of view, the framing, and the composition harmonize themselves and become photography.
The baby, also, has an attraction to the light. Sometimes I find myself desiring the ceremonial moment, in the baptism, of the candlelit by godparents and shine over the group that will swear the protection for that child, witnessed by a priest.
Even the most inattentive child, that can not understand well what is happening there, since the candle of holly light approaches, all her attention is focused on it by the eyes and the hands, as if an adoration was necessary and she already knew that the light is the main reason of her existence and needed to be celebrated.
That is what the baby, in the way of being baptized, has in common with the photographer, near to him as a chronicler of his first symbolic act of many others that the life will deliver to him. The fascination with the light that the baptism photographer will take advantage of for his own pleasure and testify that it was true.
At least, I like to think so.
