When my mom was a little girl and experienced a bad day at school thanks to a classmate, she would come home and tell my grandmother all about.
And I mean ALL about it.
She would go on and on about how much she didn’t like the person in class, talking non-stop as children do, listing every terrible quality she could think of.
“They’re stupid and mean and…and…”
My grandmother would listen patiently. And then, the venting finally slowed to a trickle, she would gather my mom into her arms and ask her the same question every time:
“You have told me all the bad things. Now…tell me something GOOD about this person.”
Naturally, my mom would insist there was NOTHING good about them. But my grandmother would simply sit quietly and wait, knowing what would come next.
And sure enough, after a moment or two, my mom would start thinking.
“Well…they are good at drawing.”
“They let me use their eraser.”
“They shared a cookie once…”
And just like that, the good started to outweigh the bad. And the whole situation looked different.
I never met my grandmother; she passed away a long time before I was born. But I love this story. My mom would share it often and the lesson in it has stayed with me my entire life.
“Now, tell me something good…”
I think about my grandmother often when I look at the world around us. Sure, there’s plenty of division and bickering. And if we let it, that’s all we’d ever see.
But we choose to look for the good.
The joyful.
The heartwarming.
Because it’s always there, waiting just beneath the “they’re stupid and mean and…”
That’s always been the heart of our photography…to find the good.
To capture the beauty in people, in nature, and in the moments that remind us how much good there is in the world. And to preserve the connections that make those moments matter.
That joy has always been the focus of our photography: to bring out the beauty in people, in nature, in life.
Friends the world will always have its share of “stupid and mean and…”
But, it also has sunset moments: flashes of breathtaking beauty that fill your soul and strip away everything else.
And if you focus just right…the sunsets win.
Just like my grandmother knew they would.
Now…tell me something good.
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