Love is Greater Than …Life through a lens of love and hope

Wow! What an amazing couple of days I just had. For those of you who don’t know, I just spent two days in Aurora, IL which is just outside Chicago for the STORY ‘09 conference. When I first heard of STORY a few months ago, I knew I wanted to be a part of it. I loved the idea, I loved the premise… I wanted to be a part of STORY’s… uh, story. So I sent an email to Ben Arment, the guy who dreamed this whole thing up and told him that I lived a few hours away, and would love to serve in any way I can… but I let him know that he should know I’m a photographer =).

We exchanged some emails, and eventually Ben asked me and another rad photographer named Daniel Stancil out to shoot the event. Honored may not be a strong enough word. This was truly an amazing day, and even though I spent most of the day working, what little I heard of the speakers left me with a lot to think about.

Some random observations before I get to a few of my favorite pictures:

• I have never seen so many iPhones in my life. Seriously.
• Honestly if Steve Jobs walked in the room, he’d probably agree with me.
• Why oh why if Christians can dress and look so cool, hip, and modern… does K-Love keep playing the same ten dated songs over and over?
• @loswhit gave me a hug. I have no problem name dropping him. From the few moments we got to chat, Carlos is a very rad guy and I sincerely hope our paths cross again in the future.
• Speaking of twitter… I can not believe how many faces I got to put with twitter names. I met more @name’s than I can remember or care to type out here, and I had met @flowerdust (Anne Jackson) before briefly, but seeing her again was nice. For whatever reason her and I have gone back and forth on whether or not we want to follow each other for the last year… more on this in a minute.
• Getting to work with Daniel was great. He’s an amazing photographer, and an even better person.
• I have a picture of Scott Hodge staring directly at me (camera) from the stage… I may frame that one =)
• I took 1300 photos. It was a bit of work to narrow down to my favorite 50 (I added one more at the last minute for 51), but I’m really happy with those 51. In reality, I could probably narrow it down more. Knowing there was another photographer there and knowing how rad his shots were made it easy. I did not include some major parts of the day in my favorite 51 pictures, because I know his pictures of that certain moment were better than mine.
• Back to that twitter and follow/unfollow thing… I am guilty of judging people on what little I can tell of them in their 140 characters or less tweets. I am guilty of unfairly “filling in the blanks” of someones tweets, and being an overall elitist. This is what has caused me to unfollow some pretty great people in the past, for no reason other than sticking to what I believed to be my “ideological guns.” I was an idiot. Social media is a beautiful thing, but it can also be ugly… it allows us to think we know people just because of what they choose to put out there. And at at times, it allows us to unfairly form opinions about people. I apologize.
• Some friends and family have asked me why I chose to photograph STORY at such a hectic point in my life (moving to New Mexico in eight days). The answer is fairly simple, I felt called to do it – first and foremost. Being able to be a part of something so friggin’ rad was all the excuse I needed. But, not going to lie, 1,572 views of my photo set on Flickr in less than 24 hours doesn’t hurt. Loveisgreaterphoto.com doesn’t even get 5% of that traffic a day. Plus, just being able to network with people, talk with like-minded people… all of it was totally worth it.
• I have to take a moment and thank Tanya. She is the very nice lady who hooked me up with a couple of hotel rooms. Without her, this trip wouldn’t have been possible. And, that first hotel I stayed in was friggin’ rad.
• I don’t know when the DVD’s of the sessions will be available for purchase, but I might as well be first in line.
• I made it a point to sit and try and listen through most of Don Miller’s talk… I’m glad I still got some decent shots of him
• The Paramount Theatre may just be the most beautiful location I’ve ever shot in. Can’t wait to see what beats that.

Alright, here are just a few of my favorite pictures. To view them all, check out my set on the official STORY ‘09 Flickr Page.