I’ve been asking myself this question for some time… or rather it often takes the form when I’m asking Akuri “why do i bother with all this?”. To put “all this” into context, in 5 years, photography has cost me over $10k worth of gear, hundreds of hours walking around looking for shots and dozens more staring at a computer screen. What exactly do i get out of it?

It’s been an interesting journey. when i started i just wanted to take pretty pictures. Then of course I met Chuck and his Urban Melancholy series and all that changed. After that I wanted my photography to mean something. I got pretty good at that and took an obvious next step of thinking “maybe I can get really good at this”. Things improved. I was getting lots of pats on the back, seeing the world differently and able to either create or critique images with ease. The motivation was flowing for a while but then things got a bit stale – i needed a new challenge.

Next came along some commercial gigs. I had lots of friends asking me to take pictures of their family / wedding / etc. I tried that. Hated it. Decided I’d only do probono work. Then came the really interesting commercial work – The Contender Asia. In a couple of years I’d gone from shooting pictures of flowers to in my living room to being the official photographer in what was probably the best photo job in Singapore for 2007. This opened lots of doors. I could write to event organisers and get access – like when I shot Federer vs Sampras or Sharapova in Malaysia. The first time was really exciting – sitting alongside associated press, reuters, etc. The second time I felt like i’d been here before. Maybe i get bored easily. But what about getting published – this a dream for me when i started. Well, after the Contender series hit the streets, my photography ended up getting into 50+ different newspapers / magazines, etc. The thrill soon wore off.

The money from The Contender Season 4, which followed in 2008, was pretty good. But this time we didn’t publish the photos. Turns out that I have a entire career worth of boxing images that will possibly never see the light of day. That thought would have killed me 5 years ago. Now I barely think about it.

What happened? Did i stop caring about photography or just stop caring about how others saw my work? Did I achieve the goals I set out to achieve too quickly? Did I not set the bar them high enough and i’m stopping way short? Or am i heaping too much praise on myself, I just got lucky a few times and i’m off base in my critique of myself? I’ve been asking myself these quesitons for the past year or so – in the hope that the answer will bring me newfound motivation and direction.

Well the answer came to me in an unexpected form the other day. Ume, one of our beloved dogs who you’ve seen in so many countless images with Akuri, passed away last Friday. We are devasted and shocked. She was far more than a dog to us – an integral part of our family whose daily presence lit up our lives. Her passing happened frighteningly quickly over a traumatic period of a month or so. This is the most I’ll write about the experience online but I did want to share what happened.

Now as hurt of the last few hours of her life are slowly beginning to be replaced by the wonderful memories of her life, I’m finding myself going back through years of archives and images. I notice how the pictures I took at the beginning with poor composition, too much flash, no feeling, etc – they don’t look like her. They’re not bad pictures as such – it’s just that they don’t capture what she meant to us. It’s only as I got skilled at photography in both a technical and artistic sense do i start to see my memory of her captured in a meaningful way. I look at my favourite images of Ume and I literally see her standing right in front of me and trigger a flood of other emotions and memories. These are images that others might not recognise in the same way, but to me each one is suddenly worth a hundred of every one of my other “best” shots.

I won’t say that it took the death of a loved one to make me appreciate photography. I’ve always appreciated it and I don’t believe I take it for granted. What I perhaps didn’t realise however was just exactly how much some pictures would mean to me as time went on. Beauty since faded, locations since left and lives since lost… Perhaps it’s only after the fact we ever truly appreciate the importance of our shots.

Ultimately, I think when I asked myself “why do i take pictures”, i was really asking “who do i take pictures for”? Given that publicity, appreciation, etc never had much staying power as far as motivations, I always wondered who was really my intended audience. Well now i have my answer in undisputable form … i take pictures for me and I take them for my loved ones. If friends, strangers, peers are able to enjoy them along the way, then wonderful. If not, then I’ll be happy knowing that i’m doing more than just recording a particular time, place or event… i’m preserving memories in the way I will want to record them years from now.

We miss you Ume.