Blog on Blog

I guess I started taking photos as a serious hobby about 3 years ago. I went out, bought a camera, read lots of magazines and books and started shooting. After a short while of doing this on my own and sharing the resulting pics with family and friends I started looking online for inspiration and community.\r\n\r\nThis blog is about the blogs that inspired me (with links to some if the images) the creative communities that have helped me learn and share my work and my thoughts on my own blog.

I guess I started taking photos as a serious hobby about 3 years ago. I went out, bought a camera, read lots of magazines and books and started shooting. After a short while of doing this on my own and sharing the resulting pics with family and friends I started looking online for inspiration and community.

This blog is about the blogs that inspired me (with links to some of the images) the creative communities that have helped me learn and share my work and my thoughts on my own blog.

The blogs that really effected me were:

chromasia

Top Left Pixel

J.R. Photoblog

For me, they were all three unique and gave me something new and exciting with each post.

David Nightingale of Chromasia produces instantly arresting images that often defy belief. His photos introduced me to the world of post processing, and his pursuit of excellence in traditional photography and digital editing were a powerful inspiration. The Chromasia blog had a style of its own, I could pick a ”Nightingale” out of a line up easily, this is something that I am still a long way from achieving, but I marvel at his seemingly effortless ability to stamp his own style on each image he posts.

Here are four images from chromasia that will stay with me forever:

http://www.chromasia.com/iblog/archives/0712012018.php

http://www.chromasia.com/iblog/archives/0712132136.php

http://www.chromasia.com/iblog/archives/0802062128.php

http://www.chromasia.com/iblog/archives/0805261932.php

Sam Javenrouh from Top Left Pixel is a different type of blogger. Sam blogs with systematic regularity, and this interested me as I started to learn something about his life, loves and home town of Toronto. When local events occurred or the weather was exciting he was there with his camera, and later that day was sharing it with us. The amazing thing was that these images were not mundane, far from it! They were and are; striking, crisp and full of organic vibrance. Checking the feed on his blog is like turning the next page of a never ending novel, the story of his life. It made me want to blog every day. I wish I could stick to this, my own blog thedailycapture is something of a misnomer, and I strive to be as dedicated as Sam continues to be.

Here are four fave links from Sam”s site, sometimes known as daildoseofimagery:

http://wvs.topleftpixel.com/08/07/18/

http://wvs.topleftpixel.com/08/07/09/

http://wvs.topleftpixel.com/08/06/10/

http://wvs.topleftpixel.com/08/09/24/

Finally, Julien Roumagnac of his eponymous photoblog. Something about Julien”s photography still makes me feel a little bit emotional. I can”t put my finger on what it is, but I fall in love with every post he shares. Perhaps it is the subject of his current home town of Montreal (a place where I have spent some significant time) or perhaps it is the variety of styles he uses. I might log on expecting one of his shots of a derelict building (one of my photography passions) and find a beautifully crafted portrait, or an incredible cityscape. Julien is by no means a consistent blogger, but when they come they are something special, each one a gem in its own right. A wonderful photographer who also writes insightful stories along side each picture (often in French and English).

Here are four magical images from J.R. Photoblog

http://www.j-roumagnac.net/index.php?showimage=326

http://www.j-roumagnac.net/index.php?showimage=342

http://www.j-roumagnac.net/index.php?showimage=365

http://www.j-roumagnac.net/index.php?showimage=374

So these are the three blogs that really got my creative juices flowing and ultimately inspired me to start sharing my own images.

At this point I went looking for ways to share my images, I had been using my own website, hosted with my .mac membership. I liked the look and feel of the site, but its limitations frustrated me and I also felt like each time I published it was reaching a very small group of people, usually my family and friends and the occasional ”outsider” who stumbled across the page. A friend of mine then told me about aminus3.

Aminus3 is a fantastic way for photographers to start a blog with absolutely no knowledge of websites or blogging and/or no money to spend on such things. Jason Kravitz (@kravtiz) (one of the founders) has created an incredible community of hundreds of photographers world wide, who share photos of great quality regularly and comment on each others blogs with great feeling and understanding. This was my first experience of such things and it was fantastic. For the first time I was sharing images regularly and receiving valuable criticism from photographers who I admired. The comments were great and I felt I was building relationships with fellow togs!

However, again it was the limitations of the format that made me want to look elsewhere. I wanted to create a website that was unique to me and would help to enhance my photography, I think I was striving to create my own style as I had come to love those of my favourite bloggers. I tried to return to my .mac site, but was instantly frustrated by those limitations that had turned me off it in the past. So I looked at the sites I loved and tried to work out how they did it. It was here that I took the leap into pixelpost.

I created the site I wanted and started to post images. thedailycapture was born! But in order to get the hits & comments I desired I was mirror posting on aminus3 and thedailycapture. Not really ideal. Then came twitter!

Twitter is a micro blog, just 140 chars, but an incredibly powerful tool for sharing and building a community of like minded people. I had no idea how this would change my experience of being a sharing photographer online. As I started to follow fellow togs I organically fell into a small group of very talented photographers and wonderful people. My experiences with twitter now even surpass that of the aminus3 community, we share our creativity, give and receive comments and criticism, and chat about all things tog and not tog.

This really all began with linking up with Ilan Bresler. I had been following his blog for some time and loved his photography as well as his honest and interesting blogs that accompanied them. Once I started chatting with him on twitter I realised how valuable this resource was, and how it made these very distant ”Uber Bloggers” (who I imagined to be well above my amateur status) accessible and humanised them for me. Suddenly I was sharing pics and thoughts with guys and girls who I had only been admiring from afar. I won”t name all of those ”tweeps” here, because you”ll probably be the ones reading this anyways! 🙂 Suffice to say, If you are willing to share, and want to learn, you”ll find them.

So that is my journey into the world of blogging. I now find myself in a great place where I am always learning and hopefully improving, being challenged and maybe occasionally sharing my own limited knowledge too. Moreover I feel I am making new friends and growing as a photographer and a person. 🙂