Photography is all about expressing our emotions visually.

Being able to express your feelings in the simplest terms makes your message both attractive and accessible.

We try to communicate a message of beauty, of solidarity of hope of fear or of loathing, but our images are always tools through which we try to express ourselves.

We've all heard the old adage that a picture tells a thousand words, but I disagree, because words are such clumsy things, pictures paint emotion directly into the viewer's brain without the messy frivolity of words.

And don't for a moment believe that you are not trying to capture an emotion, that you pictures are just pictures.

NO!

A thousand times no.

Every time we click the shutter we are trying to capture a feeling.

When we photograph a portrait of a loved one, we aren't trying to capture what they look like, we are trying to store the characteristics about them that we love. When we photograph a beautiful landscape, we aren't celebrating the rolling hills and the colors of the sunset. We are bottling and storing the emotion, the feeling that it stirred in us, so that we can enjoy it again later and perhaps even share it with others. When we photograph a sportsman scoring a goal, we are celebrating the admiration we had for the mastery held over the game.

And if your pictures aren't good enough, then it's simply because you haven't identified the emotion you are aiming for.

Now, let's see if you can guess which emotion I had in mind when I shot the picture attached to this post.