It's ALL About the Photos

I forgot to mention that this blog is only about the photos. If this is the future of information/experience sharing then I want to see it! What will blogs become in the future except occasionally creative multimedia outlets, ways to live vicariously? The dialogue is just filler – read (or ignore) the captions and maybe learn a little bit about the world; it’s not very important. Enjoy the colors, revel in the people, imagine the experience, get interested, push your envelope, and go some place, … Take a trip and experience the world! Satisfy your curiosity. Make your life a little richer.

Why these particular photos? No reason; these are what I have, and I don’t spend much time selecting them. I have not been nearly everywhere, but I have been to some of the places that are changing the most in the last little while. I explore, how people live, what makes people happy (I’ll let you know when I figure it out – it’s not money…), and how they are changing. All are good memories – might this blog be mostly for me, after all? I’ve found that photos stitch my memories together – they are the skeleton of the stories that I remember. I even find I take photos with a thought to telling a story of that trip/place in the future – subconsciously writing the tale (or manipulating the memories?) ahead of time .

I hesitate to reveal about me too much via photos. The photos are me – invading peoples’ space gently as I try for a good expression takes a lot out of you and makes you work for each image. And soooo many are not good enough to share – just not the right combinations of conditions, but every scene being photographed seemed great at the time. Having a digital (or any other, if you actively use it – at least with digital you can’t spend much time futzing with equipment, missing the moment) camera changes your trip – you now see things too often through the lens of the camera. You need to let your feel for a good photo take over, and occasionally take more pictures than you think that you should (just to get the 10%-20% that are worth having). But taking too many pictures makes for a boring life – live in the moment, and take photos only after you have absorbed it all. Fill the frame with people and plants and animals and things, or crop the photo appropriately before you share it, and throw away the bad ones quickly.

I still ask – why bother blogging?

Photos: Daughter of an outdoor produce merchant (my neighborhood, Wuqing, China), one of the last photos I took in China. Bronze pouring, The Crucible, Oakland, CA.