Many years ago a photographer-friend compared websites to gardens. He said that few people want to visit an untended garden. At the same time he was encouraging me to put more of the effort I had been investing in writing for social media sites like Flickr into writing for my own website. I agreed with his philosophy but at the time it just wasn't much in line with my priorities. I had a personal website but it largely sat stagnant. I used it more as a static portfolio site and Flickr was more like my daily photographic journal. Over the years though, those priorities have shifted, especially as Flickr itself has grown long in the tooth and its future slowly become less certain. I used to spend a significant amount of time on Flickr, posting and writing. It was (and still is) quite important to me. Early on in my life as a photographer, a big influence on me was Galen Rowell, more for the generosity with which he shared his thoughts on photography than the photography itself. I have been driven by a desire to share much of my philosophy on photography as well and up to now I was content to share that via Flickr. But as I mentioned, those attitudes have shifted with time.
So you are standing in my new garden and for those of you reading this in November of 2016, you get to be witnesses to the first plantings and I greatly appreciate that. As that friend of mine emphasized though, a garden must be well tended to flourish and grow. So this blog will not be a haphazardly done activity, it will be alive and vital and it will slowly grow over time into something that I hope many can enjoy and benefit from. Along the wandering pathways you can expect to find many different things. There will be technical info: the cameras I have used and the films I have exposed and just how I have worked with each. There will be philosophical musings. There has to be. So much of how I approach photography is philosophical and I think being mindful of how we think about photography has a great impact on how we do photography. There will be entries on photographic adventures and odysseys, hopefully not infrequently... and of course, there will be photographs themselves. I do not plan to cycle the galleries on the site terribly often. They are intended to be the collections of images that mean the most to me. They will undoubtedly change but that change should be gradual. But secondary collections can and will show up over here too. This garden will not just be a collection of typed words, but of images. And just as importantly, this will be a place where we can spend time together. The nature of a blog means that communication is biased in one direction but there will be room for questions and comments and I promise to make a heroic effort to respond to any and all queries. So feel free to start a conversation, I am trying to create a space that is conducive to talking about photography.
So thank you, for right now and for all future participation. Thank you to those that have known and followed me for years and to those who are stopping by for the first time. I look forward to what the future of this garden brings.
