The Story I Keep Telling

I was rewatching a webinar with Unleashed Education.

Two instructors. Two completely different ways of describing how they make an image. Craig talked about a dream he'd had — an actual image that showed up in his sleep. He woke up and went and made it real. Charlotte doesn't work that way at all. She shows up, watches what's happening, and finds the story that's already there. It's easy to hear that and think Craig is the "real" artist. The visionary. The one who sees it before it exists.

I have had to talk myself out of believing that. Because most of my sessions, I'm Charlotte.

I show up. I read the dog, the light, the person that drove them to the session. I make the image almost on the fly, based on what that dog is giving me that day. I’ve studied their questionnaire or worked through a planning call with them, but much of what we’re getting is decided on actually during the session itself.

But here's what I've been sitting with lately.

It's not that one of them is the artist and one of them isn't.

It's that they're telling different kinds of stories.

If I'm trying to tell a documentary story — something that's actually happening, right now, in front of me — I have to be response-first. I have to watch and wait and follow. If I’m telling a portrait story or a personality story I am often response-first.

But what I have discovered is that most of the time, without even realizing it, I'm telling the same story over and over.

Every session. Every dog.

The dog the way you remember them.

Not exactly how they looked. How you felt when you looked at them.

Because that's what nostalgia actually is. It's not accuracy. It's not "this is precisely how it happened." It's the feeling — softer, warmer, a little more golden than the moment probably actually was.

That’s the story I'm always chasing. A little warm. A little gold. Slightly hazy at the edges — the way your best memories are soft at the edges.

A little better than real life.

Not because I'm lying about the dog. Because I'm showing you the version of them that already lives in your chest.

I know exactly where that comes from.

I built my dog photography around my foster dogs. Dogs who weren't going to stay with me long, by design. I knew that going in, every time — the photograph was going to be the thing that outlasted the dog in my life. It would be what I held onto of them.

Then there was Lira.

She was born in my hands, on April 27th 2016, in my home, thirty seconds after I'd turned my car around because I forgot my wallet. She wasn't supposed to make it through her first 24 hours. She made it almost a decade.

But I lived most of that decade knowing I would not get to have her as long as I wanted. Multiple hospitalizations. Special-order kibble and fresh catfish fillets at 3pm and bison sirloin cooked at 3am, every single day for years, because she was alive and I wasn't taking a single day of that for granted. I loved her with my whole heart while always halfway grieving her, because I knew how quickly her story was likely to end. I opened my heart up to her and let it rub me raw almost every day. I wouldn’t trade a single second.

But that does something to how you see a dog with a camera in your hand. You stop trying to photograph what's happening. You start trying to photograph what you feel.

That story doesn't just show up. I have to build toward it.

But I know it when it's happening — before I even check the back of my camera.

I workshop the image in the moment. I'll get the dog roughly where I think I want them. Take a few frames. Look at the back of the camera. Move left, get lower, wait for a different expression. Give the dog a break, check the images, adjust again, take a few more.

And then, sometimes, right as I click the shutter — before I've looked at anything — I feel it.

That's the image.

It's usually the one I send my client as their thank-you postcard. It's the one I edit first when I get home, because I can't wait to see it finished the way I could already see it in my head, even if I didn't know that exact image was going to exist before I got there.

So maybe the real question was never vision-first or response-first.

Maybe it's just: how am I going to tell this story today?

Because I'm not always the same kind of artist.

But I'm always chasing the same feeling.