The purpose of this blog is to chronicle my time as a photographer, from my early days working for the Texas State University Star newspaper as a videographer, to the years long gap in any sort of creative endeavor, to now–launching my own website and curious to see where my camera will take me.
I should be upfront and state that I’m not that interested in the tech aspect of photography, so if you’re looking for a tech blog, please look somewhere else. Gear is great and you should absolutely know your tools inside and out, but any photographer worth their salt will tell you that photography is about understanding things far beyond the scope of how many megapixels you can capture or how great your boco is. None of it means a damn thing if you don’t understand light, color, tone, geometry, subject matter, and your own artistic process.
Indeed, it’s the artistic process that I find the most fascinating. In learning about photography, you inevitably learn about the world around you and by extension, you learn about yourself. For me, photography is just as much a spiritual practice as it is a practical one. Yeah, I’d love to make photos for a living. I’d be lying if I said this website wasn’t partly a marketing ploy. But if I ever get to a point where photography is a meaningless grind, then I’ve lost the purpose of capturing images altogether.
That said, I will share my settings and set ups so that you can understand the full context of any given photo and what I was trying to achieve. Part of the process is seeing what works and what doesn’t. Taking the process even further means learning to love your mistakes, and understanding that what you may think is boring or uninteresting, someone else may absolutely love, and of course vice versa. I think being comfortable with your failures helps you grow as a person, let alone as a photographer.
This blog will also serve as a place to put work I wouldn’t normally want to share on social media like Instagram and Reddit, though I’m sure I’ll discuss the importance of social media in photography at some point.
I hope you get as much from this blog as I do. I want it to serve as an example of growth more than anything. Maybe you can take the lessons I’ve learned from photography and apply them to other aspects of your life, who knows? But most importantly, I hope you just enjoy photography for the sake of it the same way I do. The best advice I ever got from a professional photographer was to “keep photography personal.”
