Monday, January 5, 2009

Why a Blog?

I had never read a blog until the end of December 2008, which is when I stumbled upon Vincent Laforet's Blog. I had been searching through articles about the Canon 5D Mark II and came upon a video named 'Reverie'. After I finished watching the video for the fifteenth time I went to Vincent's Blog which had some behind the scenes and his thoughts on the 5D. I went through his blog reading fervently the different articles that had been posted since the Beijing Olympics. (I strongly recommend watching the videos shot in Hawaii following Jamie O'Brien's surfing) I immediately feel in love with blogging. 

The world online that I had otherwise previously been oblivious too showed it's beauty. After a day or two of looking at Vincent's Blog I had read much of the material available and wanted more. I then found out about a man named David Hobby. David is known throughout the online photography community simply as the Strobist. If there were a single compilation of all lighting techniques known to man they would be found on his blog. At 1:00am in the morning I found the Strobist's Lighting 101 page and spent the next subsequent hours reading through each of the many articles. In that one long night I learned more about off camera flash lighting then in an entire year of photography classes. From there I had to move on to more and more photography blogs and the newest blog I ravaged for all it's worth was Chase Jarvis' Blog. The behind the scene videos offered insight to the workings of a professional photographer I aspire to be like. And after watching video after video I was down to one final video at the entirely respectable time of 3:30am. The final video was titled 'Making the Web Work for You'. This beast of a video is over 80 minutes in entirety. The video explained how blogging has changed their approach to photography. Chase Jarvis stated that it allowed him to not only give back to the community by explaining how he did his photography but also allowed him to understand himself and his photography. 
At this point I no longer desired to just read the postings of others but to contribute myself to better those around me in the community of online photographers. This is why I have setup this blog. 

My next task to is to briefly give you a background of who I am and what I have been doing previous to my blogging days.