As a photographer, Merton wants his images to communicate a sense of love, hope, warmth, longing, contemplation and nostalgia - the kind of feeling one would experience when having a meal with your family and friends, going to church to say a prayer and reading your favorite book or magazine on a Sunday afternoon. Merton wishes the viewers to be transported through his images into their own sense of beauty where ordinary everyday life is captured through the compositions and colors of the subject matter. His work invites you to pause and appreciate the extraordinary in the ordinary we find around us. He loves shooting film because the outcome of the images are often unpredictable and never perfect as life can be. He often refers to the Japanese idea of wabi sabi where one finds the beauty in all things that are imperfect. He approaches each frame not only in search of that particular feeling but also stripped down to its essence in order to tell a story.