the gate

"The" gate

I keep taking pictures of this dumb gate. I don't know what it is, but I keep coming back to it. It’s not very pretty, but it feels good to take a picture of.

And sometimes—or maybe even most of the time—I’m taking a picture because of the way it feels. Maybe not so much the way it makes me feel, though there is a bit of that. I’ll ramble on occasionally about the "spark" of photography, and that’s definitely a thing. The spark is how an image affects you.

But this is something a little different. This is what I think people are inadvertently referring to when they say so-and-so has "such a good eye."

What they mean—whether they realize it or not—is that the photographer has tuned themselves to a frequency where they can feel what might make a good picture. It’s not that the scene elicits some emotion from the photographer it’s that the photographer can feel that this one is “good” and so they take the picture.

Sometimes, a thing just feels like a "good" picture. And when that happens, you just gotta take the photo. Again and again if necessary.