The Capture
By Chris Carnel
Heckler co-Founder and Special Projects Photographer

My good friend Sonny, who edits this magazine, occasionally tells me with a smile on his face while shaking his head, “Dude, photographers are just weird.” I kind of agree. We aren’t the everyday mainstream worker bees. How could anyone normal look at the world the way a
photographer does? We tendto experience things in amostly solitary manner with flash power settings, EV values, and F-stops in our head. When photographing thingsalone with just you and your camera, daily life takes on adimensional shape of colorschemes, compositional elements, possible motion blurs (panning), and before the click even happens, the decid-uous duty of documenting what seems so important or compelling. “How will I capture this?” is foremost in my
neurotic mind. After the click of the shutter, that previous thought soon becomes, “I hope I got it.”
High levels of trust in your processing labplagues all this. And just for fun, throw in the physical ailment in the form of a backpack and its arsenal of lense arching your back in ways not meant for the human spine to be stressed upon (Iespecially feel sorry for you 16mm film guys). I’m not at a
stationary desk, and I’m not straightening a tie. I’m in the trenches (so to speak) experi-encing life in a way most people will never sense, witness or quite comprehend.As a photographer, I’m part
of my environment whether it’s rain, snow, sun or fog. I’m also in my head and by myself when the moment to shoot arises. Wherever I am in whatever part of the planet, be it snow, cement orbright lights projectingthrough pitch black, I want to capture it. That becomes my instinctive plea. We are the fucking lensmen (or lenswomen) with a long ass lens today, maybe a small wide-angle lens tomorrow. Just watch out for aggressive people who might want to kick your ass, like Sean Penn and Tommy Lee. They’ll winbecause us photographers areweird introverted sissies. But it’s all worth it, just as long as you fired back in time and got the shot.