If I stop to think about it, and I have, I realized that my passion for photography goes back exactly forty years. Damn. It all started when I received a Kodak Disc camera as a gift back in 1982. This thing was so easy to use that a child could do it. Pop the disc in, snap, take to the one-hour photo booth, buy more discs when you are there and then enjoy the prints. Well, then the Minolta disc came along shortly after and wow, my first upgrade. This thing had a handle that you could also prop up to use as a stand and a tiny mirror in the front. So let’s all blame Minolta for the selfie trend starting back in the early eighties. My high school had a photography class complete with dark room and print lab. Loved it until it was time to play football. Thereafter, it’s been a few point and shoot cameras until 2001 when I bought my first digital camera. So yeah, you can say I’ve enjoyed photography for quite a while. So, why stick it out this long?
As much as photography has been a part of my life I still feel like a poser or a wannabe although I’ve been published in books, magazines, websites, sold my work, organized and hosted two photography conferences in two major cities, owned my own business, and participated in two art shows. I do have some laments:
- No prints on the wall
- No photo books on the shelf
- No decent organization to the archives
- What’s the point of all these photos if they are buried in a hard drive?
These will all change this year starting with the Archives. Organized by years, finally, I’ll need to go back in and cull the duplicates and delete the undesired photos. Then, add geotags, face recognition, and keywords for better sorting and search. Then and only then can I begin to think of hanging prints or publishing photo books.
My photography means a lot to me and now it is time to completely enjoy it.