Every other website I have seen about wedding photography offer their services purely in the realm of photography. This approach assumes that capturing beautiful pictures and presenting them well to people would result in them loving it and paying well for it. I would not like to take the same approach, as that is not what I am after particularly.

I think my motives are a lot more deeper than that. The society and other external pressures, combined with little understood internal drives and wants that are almost totally constrained in the sub-conscious mind and thus not fully appreciated by people, have the general mass of them confused. They long for direction and inner fulfillment. They aim to get the latter by following seductive directions offered by society and the media, and many get side-tracked even more by it, leading to increased confusion and further muddling of their motives. They carry on this way like lemmings, too caught up on impressing other people and attempting to fill their inner void by working on jobs they don't like, buying stuff they don't need and doing things that have no potential for long term satisfaction.

They are constantly in the search for more: more money, more time, more things, more appreciation, more gratification. But, I really doubt that they would ever find it in the paths they have let society choose for them.

But, they do sense this feeling of disconnect. The very fact that they are constantly after things in the hope of making them feel gratified implies that the they thought would fetch them all that before didn't work. There is thus a tension that develops within them, and it may get amplified by the way, triggered by the growing sense of confusion between the things that really fulfill them and the things that they are after. They do not know they are searching for something, and when they do not find it even after a long time and after a lot of wrong advice from other members of the same tribe, they might assume that there's something wrong within them and that they better fall back in line with the currently accepted social rules for success.

They would tend to do a lot of soul-searching, reading the countless books on the subject that validate every thought that they have about the nature of things. And, after all the time invested, their search isn't any close to it's end.

As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi remarks in "Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention", it's those sensitive people who have access to these emotions and the feeling of disconnect, and who experience life at  very intense levels, who try to resolve the resulting tensions through some sort of creative expression. They just have to have their tensions and their attempts at resolving them manifested and comunicated to be more at peace with themselves.

I find myself in an interesting position. Not only do I experience the aforementioned feelings of tension and disconnect everyday, I love to observe in the behavior of other people and see if they experience it too, and try to explain their behaviors. They laugh, sing, joke, play around etc. And, at weddings, I frequently get to see these behaviors. These people do it because they largely are in the flow on that day and hence do not permit the regular societal rules to govern their behavior - acting "proper" and being "dignified". And, I love to capture them when they are in such states. It's the side of themselves they would not normally see. They are in the zone, in flow. There's no fear of failure, no marking of time, completely absorbed and other characteristics that Mihaly lists out for flow. And, I find it delightful to capture people in such states. And, capture them well.

All states of flow are self-absorbing. It would lead to positive or negative states in a person's mind. It's these self-absorbed states that I intend to capture: those with positive feedback at weddings and other kinds of feedback in other settings.

In these times of shortened attentions spans, plenty of avenues to experience flow having very low thresholds (sex, reading, watching T.V. that does not involve active involvement nor the presence of intense intrinsic or extrinsic motivators to get over the threshold, which might be required some activities like rock-climbing, public-speaking etc.), the number of times people experience flows and the qualities of them when experience is diminishing. Most of the time, people walk around in a state of entropy (again borrowed from the Creativity book), where thoughts aren't directed, and have no structure or purpose.

People love to see themselves in photographs in the first place, and catching them in these states of flow is even more pleasurable to them. I'm almost like a voyeur, eavesdropping and recording most people experiencing superior qualities of flow. I guess I also experience a similar kind of flow vicariously, which is also also one of my motivators to catch people at it.

I guess this is also the reason why I dislike making people pose for me. Not only does it disrupt the subjects flow at an event, but it does the same for my sense of flow too -being the flow detective-. Also, the skills required for making the couple of pose well for me is currently out of my comfort zone.

This is also why I love to ask questions to people. Apart from the fact that I am curious, subjects need to answer my questions and hence need to be in a flow when they do it. It makes them feel important and valued, making them experience a different and possibly a higher quality of flow. I also like to induce people into these dual-parallel flows by giving them other low-threshold flow-generating tasks like asking for information well known to them or making them do a low intensity task. Answering questions are also low-threshold flow-generating tasks.

Well, I now have a feeling that causing people to pose in front of the camera too would lead them into a flow if done correctly (minimal distractions, precise instructions, no embarrassing surroundings and a confident subject). But, would the flow be "natural"? There is nothing sacred about natural flows - and experiencing "unnatural" flows could be very interesting for the subject - that would lend itself to photography better, but it just doesn't sit well with me at the moment. I guess I am more concerned about capturing the natural flows in a person. At display would be all kinds of genuine emotions and honest flaws, and capturing them all would give a truer picture about the way the person actually is, rather than giving false impressions through glamorous photographs that add a lot of qualities that just makes it look fake. Twenty years hence, I believe that it would be the natural captures that people most warm up to, and not the posed ones, though both might give a good deal of joy to the viewer. For a lot of glamorous photographs, see Jerry Ghionis's work.

Glamor added to posed photographs sure makes it look very striking, but it isn't real in some sense. It isn't authentic. It does not speak to me. It has it's place if the study of the relationships between objects in space or if bringing out particular messages from the subject and the surroundings in the most efficient and powerful way is what the photographer is after.

But, I would take a photograph depicting genuine emotions captured in real time and post-processed to highlight it any day. It's more honest and does greater justice to the subject, her personality and to his/her feelings about himself/herself.

I somehow need to get all if this stuff out on my website. I need to communicate my motives and my need to capture candid portraits clearly and in an entertaining manner. I also need to read more of Creativity and gather further insights into my mind and put it out on the site. Look at one of the entries in this notebook where Mihaly talks about how websites need to be to grab people's attention. Should be put to good use.