The sun is getting high enough in the sky to start burning off the heavy fog that has enveloped the Morton Arboretum on Christmas Eve, 2019. I was struck by the sense of transformation when I made this photo. Night into day. Fog into sunlight. And the last few leaves still hanging on for a bit longer despite winter’s arrival with the solstice three days earlier. All life is change.
2020 has arrived. One of my beginning of the year chores is to update my website with a revised copyright notice. That usually prompts a look through the cobwebs of my sadly neglected pages. As per usual, the blog section of the website has been the most neglected. My last entry was part one of a three part series — the other parts probably never to be penned (it’s been too long since I used the camera I was discussing).
In my defense, 2019 was an utterly crazy year. It featured my wedding to my beautiful and talented wife, a cross country move, a new job and a host of other lesser challenges. Time is a commodity that I never seem to have much of and the blog and website always seem to suffer because of it.
However, I do seem to find time for posting what work I do on Facebook and Instagram. The thing is, I don’t really *like* either of those platforms very much.
Facebook has become the poster child for everything I hate about social media — polarized vitriol spewed at one another, targeted ads every third post or so, memes posted proudly that have little or no grounding in reality, etc. ad nauseum. In addition to all the social media woes, Facebook’s image compression algorithms are about the worst I’ve come across and the subtle nuance of much of my work is lost and pictures look nothing like I intended.
Instagram has at least remained a trifle more civil than Facebook but I don’t think it’s the prime outlet for fine art photography. It’s the realm of selfies and influencers and over-the-top filters. I think Instagram can serve as a tool for fine art photographers but it should not be their primary web presence.
I’ve tried to get back on Flickr a little bit. I’ll be honest and say that I still haven’t found my groove there, though. Part of this is that I spend too much time on Facebook and Instagram, despite my dissatisfaction with those platforms. Their interfaces, especially their phone apps are simply better for the brief moments when I have time to look at stuff. Additionally, while I commend SmugMug on their efforts so far, Flickr still doesn’t have the vibe that it did a decade or more ago. Part of that is probably users like me who started spending less time there during the dysfunctional Yahoo and Verizon years.
Where that leaves me is here. Of all the places on the web, this is the place that is most likely to be a good home for my photography. That’s a benefit I really haven’t capitalized on. And it’s something that needs to change. So, in the spirit of recognizing the ophthalmologic tie, here’s my 2020 vision for me and this site:
- All photo posts that would be posted primarily on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram and Flickr will instead be posted here first. I will most likely post links on those platforms to the primary post here in the blog but I want *this* to be the home of my photography and those other places simply roads that lead here.
- I will work on cleaning up the galleries and overall site layout to better reflect where I’m at photographically. Some of the material on this site better relates to who I was a decade ago. I’d like the site to be a little more organic and showcase who I was, who I am and who I’d like to be with my artistic vision.
- I’d really like to establish a better platform for selling prints, folios and such. While I like having my work visible on the web for my friends to see, my prints are what I really want to showcase as my art. A picture online is just an image. A print is a final object that reflects my ideal output for my photography.
- I’d like to be more active in the blog. Reading through my archives will showcase a number of posts stating similar goals. I think the problem is that I want every single post to be a 2000 word exercise in wit and wisdom. I think the key will be to relax with such lofty goals and simply focus on making posts — even if they’re just a single picture with a caption that is a sentence or two long.
And there we go. Hopefully when 2021 rolls around and it’s time to once again update the copyright notice, I’ll have made some progress. If not, I’m sure I’ll find this post as my last entry and will make the same ruminations and goals next year, LOL!
Happy new year, everyone. I wish you all the best in 2020!
-Chris