Fourteen years of Photography and Writing

Summary Page

A journal like this gives one the opportunity to look back over the years and remember more details and thoughts about a shoot than simple photo sharing sites like Tumblr or Instagram. I wished I had realized this sooner. Reading old posts from ten or more years ago has helped me to remember the reasons and the excitement of particular shoots, why certain projects were started, and often the fun of the shoot itself.

Writing about the shoot as opposed to simply posting images from the event provides a far better picture of the time spent planning and executing the shoot. On Tumblr or 500px or Deviant Art, the image is the point and not the thought process and work required to get the image.  Now I look back and see that there are six years (from 2013 to 2019) where I only posted images on Tumblr/Instagram and wrote very little about how or why I took the images.

Now, for every photoshoot, I do keep a summary record in a database where I record the date/time/location and model.  I summarize how the shoot progressed, include an example image and grade myself and the model on the shoot.  That way I can go back and look at the data to determine how to improve and what projects work best for which models.  The summaries tend to be succinct and are meant only as a quick reference and don't truly capture all my thoughts around a shoot, but I'm certainly glad I started the habit, because now I can go back and create posts around those shoots if I so desire.  Those post won't be as accurate as those created contemporaneously to the shoot, but I can at least try to recreate some history.

My goal for the rest of this year is be more proactive in writing about my shoots and recording the processes and thoughts around them.  I'm also going to once weekly write a post I'll probably call Wayback Wednesday in which I'll post some shots from previous years along with what I remember about the model and the shoot.  Chances are those post won't interest anyone but me, and maybe the model involved, but since this blog has virtually no readers anyway and I'm primarily writing for myself, it doesn't really matter.