As you can tell from the dates, I’ve been negligent in my blog activities.
A recent reading of Dirck Halstead’s The Digital Journalist prompted me to get back in gear. He releases a new issue every month and what I enjoy the most about the articles is the condition of people and events in the world we know nothing about.
I do this for fun; I like to write and enjoy photography. While it is enjoyable and very rewarding to see your images and stories on the Internet I’ve realized that it’s more work than I thought. As I don’t have a website with my portfolio on it (yet) this will do just fine.
In the same vein, it’s important to be creative and not be a slave to your job, career or work. Like The Digital Journalist, being creative allows you, or forces you, to look at the world a little differently. Whether we see the relationships between colors, the sadness or joy in people’s faces, or forms that exist only in your viewfinder it’s important to remember that’s there more to us than our little circle.
I store my images on Flickr so others can see them. I submit images to JPG Magazine because there’s a possibility they’ll print one of my pictures. What I’ve realized is that you have to show others your pictures; photographs exist to be shared and that’s why they’re so effective at telling stories. Whether as a photo essay or an individual image, a photograph immediately creates a feeling, a thought or an idea in the viewer, just as it did with the photographer.
Communication…perception.
I made the Alcatraz image during a tour of the prison. I recommend the tour; the island is fascinating and how many of us get to see the inside of a prison, especially one as notorious as Alcatraz. From a different vantage point, you can see San Francisco through the window in the picture. I have never been incarcerated but I imagined how horrible it would be to have the view of civilization well outside your reach and access.
If you enjoy submitting images and seeing them in print check out JPG Magazine. It’s a photography magazine that uses images submitted by its readers. I wish I would have come up with the idea. They have themes and I find it useful to see how my individual pictures sometimes fit within a theme; it makes me identify things in my photographs that I didn’t see on my own.
TONY GERMAN 