Every semester as I get ready to teach my class at Allegheny College I go through my past course descriptions and hand-out to get an idea of how I want to approach this class. One of my hand-out has been a copy of an article by photographer Jim Gehrz. This guy is a photographer. The title of the article is 'finding your photograph' and he talks about how he approaches an assignment and does all the necessary things to tell the story, but he takes it one step further and works all of that into his way of seeing and documenting--he isn't satisfied until he finds that one frame or two that really speaks to him. I understand this. I will be working a subject with my camera and feeling like I'm getting all the right parts to tell a story, but I'm not satisfied. So I keep searching and looking. Sometimes its subtle--an angle or waiting for the light to do something special--other times its a fleeting moment caught. I never really know what it is...I think I do and try things...but what it comes down to is its just something where everything comes together just right to say just the right things at the right time. I was working the other night with Jessica on her portfolio and this picture above was that frame to me. It is real and for some reason it says more to me than all of the other frames we took that night. There seems to be something searching in those eyes. I took several frames with her hair like this, but they are different--this one was the one. It was my photograph. The image below I decided to try a few frames where I hit Jessica with the full power of my on camera flash to see what I got. I know from experience using this technique that if the features a re strong enough a nice image can be made. I didn't do much with this--I think I took 4 frames total, but this one I liked and when I darkened up the features using brightness and contrast in photoshop it began to look like an old ink drawing. SayerMotter Photographs by Richard Sayer