Recently I've been pondering why it is that I can spend happy hours absorbed in the photography gallery on here, clicking link after link, drifting through gallery after gallery (and more often than not forgetting to comment anything, I am shamed to admit).

The thing that attracts me most in a photo is that sense of reality. Not necessarily a sense of realism, but a sense of the real. A photo is a piece of existence caught forever - something that I would never have seen if that artist hadn't chosen that place and that exact time to press the shutter button. I love photos that I can look at and think - this is real, this existed, this is a tiny part of the world right in front of my eyes. I feel them like gifts, sometimes. There's so much in the world and we're only given a finite time to see as much as we can, to see in as many different ways as we can. And I suppose that's why we have art.