Hello World!

Well, this being my maiden voyage into blogland, naturally makes me excited and nervous all at once. What do I say? How do I reserve to keep it simple and clean? How will it come across to the viewing public, etc., etc.? And more intimidating, how do I keep up with the blog? It seems that once you breathe life into the monster, you’ll have to keep the heart beating and that takes a lot of time and work. I feared I can’t manage it and will end up causing more raucous than I intend to. Anyway, with the prodding of my great friend and supporter, Annette, in Toronto, I finally coaxed up the courage to take the plunge.What excites me about blogs, must be the same for many others as well: a world of ideas from like and unlike minds can find an audience/readership out in netherland and have the canny effect of bridging the divide between peoples and culling out synergy where it may be, often times in disparate worlds … the web is simply a marvelously, wondrous world. I am so happy to be able to participate in it.As I say this, it reminds me of a discourse I have had with a good friend of mine recently. He, being an erudite, was lamenting the fact, in his view, “that people do not read or write as much as they once did … before television and other advancements, etc …” But I sharply disagreed, and he quickly cited the fact that many newspapers are now going belly up.Well, in my view, this could not be any more false. What has happened in recent years with the advent of the internet and emails, has had exactly the opposite effect. Besides a still hearty population of nay sayers and luddites who will not go near computers and digital equipment, the internet and email has caused a virtual writing explosion. True, the way of snail mail and person-to-person letter writing has all but been made obsolete, but more than ever, folks are writing. Due to the relatively cheaply available apparati for desktop publishing, more books than ever are being published on a yearly basis. People are reading and writing more than ever. Book sales are soaring and person-to-person letters now take on the form of email, text messaging and instant messaging (IM) online. Blogs, too, are becoming a good way of getting information out and many people rely on them for their daily dose of gossip and research.That being said, my interest as a photographer has brought me to this place. I stay abreast of the marketplace that I am in through several subscriptions to some popular periodicals: PDN, Picture, Communication Arts and American Photo, mainly. It is always pertinent to the success of my business for me to keep abreast of new developments, movements in technology and trends in the marketplace through reading these periodicals. It has recently come to my attention, that blogging is now one of the ways in which many photographers are drumming up new business and getting on the radar of potential buyers. I, too, feel it is time to step up my marketing game and play in the same pool as my peers, to get the same results.