Anyone that picks up a camera and captures that moment so we can revisit it, and hold to the nostalgia it fills us with is absolutely a photographer, a documentarian, an artist... I applaud all of it, from the untrained hands of a child, to the enthusiasm of a mother trying to hold those precious moments of childhood to the professional earning their income from it and providing others with {hopef
ully} a more beautiful and precise image capture... The best photographers in my very humble opinion, capture those moments and people in such a way that we not only see what was there in that instant, but we see it as they saw it, through their eyes and their hearts, their perception, their interpretation, in an honest and raw way that can move us. For example, I saw a photo of a very young boy, that was by no means the very best in terms of technical precision, but it instantaneously brought the father to tears and nearly his knees. And half the other viewers of the image with him... in my mind that is a successful capture, I don't care how 'right' it is, how properly exposed, technically perfect it is, or how highly paid the photographer who captured it.
