Dinner Candles

Ralph Steiner once commented that the interesting problem, the big problem to be addressed when photographing, is to know which direction to point the camera. He meant that the real issue is deciding what we put inside the frame. Left unsaid is the flip side of that decision - in deciding what to include, we also decide what to exclude.

These candles were lit for dinner. It wasn't nearly as dark as this photo seems to imply. That's the way it is with photos - you get the picture, but rarely do you get the whole picture. Sometimes, that's good. Sometimes, it's bad.

One of my photographic heroes is Lewis Hine, who made hundreds of beautiful photographs that, along with being beautiful, advanced Hine's social agenda of exposing the conditions that children worked in and helped turn public opinion against child labor. Hine is reputed to have said "Photographs do not lie, but liars may photograph."