So I created this site last night on a bit of an impulse. It was about 11pm – I had got back from an evening out with friends, just come off a Skype call with my parents who were visiting my brother in San Francisco, and was idly browsing Facebook before turning in for the night. My cousin had tagged me in a post by some guy who turned out to be a motorsports enthusiast and photographer, and so I clicked the link to have a nose at his website*. I was meandering around his site, full of photos of cars, and saw a lot of similarities between the photos he had published and a number of my own photos and started thinking “you know, this guy’s just like me… and if he can do this [publish and sell his photos online], why can’t I?”
So in my slightly alcohol-fuelled wisdom I thought “there’s no time like the present” and got the laptop out. After a bit of research, I settled on using WordPress to create a free site and see where it led. Having been introduced to WordPress in my last job and used it recently to create a small web presence for my Dad’s IT Consultancy company, I figured that would be a good place to start. Better the devil you know, eh?
Ok, so it seems building a free site on WordPress assumes you want to create a blog, but that’s ok I though to myself, I’m sure I can hide/get rid of the blog pages and just create static photo gallery pages somehow. I’m a techie, I can figure this out! I didn’t intend to start blogging… good god no, I don’t want to be one of those people who have nothing better to do than sit in front of their computers every day and publish a load of waffling drivel that no-one else will ever be interested in. What on earth would I have to write about anyway? No, my intention was to create a portfolio of my photos to showcase my photography, like Chris G’s, in the hope of one day finding a way to make some money out of them.
But today I looked again at the beginnings of the site I had created at about 2am this morning and thought, I don’t want this to be just another ‘bright idea’ that died the next day. I don’t want to just dump a selection of my favourite back-catalogue photos out on the web and do nothing with it. I want to this site to be alive and to grow. I want it to be purposeful, and the photos to be meaningful. And then I thought, well, I’m going through a bit of a personal journey at the moment… maybe I can use this site as a way to share that journey and my photographic adventures… and who knows where it may lead. And if no-one reads it, that doesn’t really matter because I’m not doing it for anyone else, I’m doing it for me.
So I have chosen an image of a sunrise to accompany this post. I took the photo on a trip to the Isle of Skye in June, and I think that the image of the dawning of a new day is a perfect accompaniment for my first ‘proper’ blog post on my new MiniF1 Photoblog.
So there we go. At least, thus far, the idea has survived beyond the morning after the night before. Long may it continue!
* The site I was pointed to was www.chrisg-photography.com. Thanks Chris for your inspiration and Rosie for putting me on to his site.
MiniF1 | Photoblog 