Smoke rings. June ‘08.

Sometimes I have favorite pictures I took that I don’t even put on here. So there.

Can’t decide if I like hipstamatic or instagram better. Either way it’s fun taking quality pics with a phone. Just gotta keep making prints for my collection!

View from the second floor of the Central Library in SA

I haven’t taken any photos in forever and that is terrible. But my Mamiya needs a new battery, I don’t like bringing my Nikon D40 with me, and someone stole my Holga. What I really want is a 35mm Miranda camera, for obvious reasons. I’m saving up though. But you know what’s cheap? Hipstamatic for the iPhone. Yup, I finally caved but it’s probably the best app I’ve ever gotten and I don’t get many. So here are a few that I took yesterday with my new toy!

GPOYThursday. The “I used to make rants on Current.com back when it used to be a good website” Edition. Also, “When you clean up your laptop’s hard drive, you find a lot of old stuff” Edition.

Lately, I have been feeling very discouraged about my photography. I used to always hear that statement, “Jack of all trades, master of none.” and wondered if now photography has fallen into the many things I know how to do but can’t do well. Should I even be bothering with it? I see other photographers with their soft portraits, their big, expensive cameras; their action photos, getting the right moment every time. I see the countries they visit and the back alleys they go down, and their strong but good use of Photoshop. I then look at my photos and see my backyard, this city I find boring and photos of friends. I see the occasionally good but mostly blurry concert photos. I see that I only have one lens to work with and an entry-level DSLR. I see that I play around with contrast, exposure, and put dodging and burning to some use but I don’t go out of my way to create an entirely different picture with Photoshop or any photo-editing tools. And then I wonder if this is me and if I actually like this. Could I sell prints, could I make a humble living out of it? Will others need my services and find them satisfactory? I feel like I’m not there yet nor will I ever be. But then I think about why I found photography important to me in the first place and this picture reignited that.

It’s photos like this that remind me why I like photography. There’s nothing special about this picture and on top of that, because of lens problems, there are a few stray spots on this photo. But the fact that this was taken at 3AM while I sat on a dock on Lady Bird Lake in Austin with one of my best friends Christine after a midnight showing of a 3D Phish concert movie in town, just makes it fantastic. Everything felt beautiful. The water was gleaming, the bright lights from some factory across the way, the quiet, the occasional silhouette of an egret with it’s long legs in the water. At some point we thought it was watching us.

I see so many of these blogs where they like to put words right across a photo. Fields of flowers, abandoned Model T’s sitting in the grass, so on and so on. And I’m thinking, the picture is already poetry. If you were there and the moment was so beautiful and you had a really great night, especially a really great night when your week is full of work and responsibilities, and you captured it, what can words splashed across a photo do for you? Why is that so necessary? There are no photos of the whole day Christine and I spent in Austin and at first, I regretted I didn’t snap more. But I’m realizing this photo sums it up. We were only an hour away from home base, an 80 mile drive, and yet we felt so far away. And this is why I love photography and why I know I shouldn’t give up on it. Because it has the power to really take you somewhere even if you’ve been before and the power to meet people all over again. Can you look at a portrait of your best friend and see a totally different person? Can you look at photos of your own backyard and think it’s somewhere else? YES! And that’s what’s so fantastic about it.

I really don’t know where my photos will take me. I don’t know if I’ll be well-known or if I’ll be at the point where I have a photo show every couple of months. Will my photos be on the cover of a local newspaper or in National Geographic? Maybe not. It could end up simply being a hobby. But I cannot be constantly comparing my work to others. I also have to realize what pictures are important to me and why. Not if they should be important to others. I’ll take the constructive criticisms but I won’t let others tell me I’m an amateur and that I don’t have passion. I went through that once before at my first group photo show when during an art walk a bunch of hipsters walked in and saw that we all weren’t professional artistes and said something quite nasty about our work without really looking at it. I was about 8 months into photography and my pictures at the time really focused a lot on buildings and landscapes so maybe it appeared that I didn’t have heart & soul in the photos. There weren’t any of laughing children and ghostly roads but I loved a lot of what I took so I remember laughing at their comments and thinking, who cares? I loved how well I did in the beginnings of my photography and I loved that I was doing a photo show with other people who were working-class, business folk, stay-at-home moms, and students. They were all hobbyists who got together and did a show which is more than what most people do. I want to go back to that same feeling I had when I did that show or even when I first picked up a camera. I had a new way to express myself. I had a way to always remember the moments. On top of that, I started out self-taught. I went through every book at the library and bought stacks of ‘em at Half-Priced Book Store. I was so determined in understanding my new love. It’s 3 years later and I think we’re still growing on one another. A marriage where we are no longer in the honeymoon stage. But I think there is a respect and an appreciation. I realize what photography can do for me and what it has done for me. So with that, I don’t want to give up. I can’t look at other people and their relationship with photography and be envious of it. I have to work on my own relationship with it. So here’s to the rest of the year to build upon that. I don’t want photography to become another thing. I want it to be my thing.