It started, innocently enough, as a hobby. Angela was singing regularly in a gospel choir, and I would follow them with my brand new Canon Rebel XT in a mix of dedicated husbandly support and a dose of Asian techno-geekery. As it turned out, those photos weren’t too bad and I started getting calls around the city to photograph more gospel artists. I was drawn to the raw emotion of people when they sing with reckless abandon. Music, especially gospel music, requires the musicians to believe in every note that they belt out. It is real, authentic, and it’s so visually interesting.

At that time, I was working – quite discontentedly – in an architecture studio, doing creatively mind-numbing CAD work. Some people are built for that regularity, I am not. To contrast the inevitable delays of construction, I fell in love with the immediacy of a photograph – you push the shutter, and you’ve literally captured a moment. What was once fleeting, is now forever. I became a collector of moments.

sometimes, those messy moments are the most deserving to be remembered