Taking a leap
Just Leap
So you have been taking photos for a long time. You have worked diligently to perfect your composition and post processing. These photographic gems are stored on your computer, an external hard drive, and in the cloud so that you don’t risk losing them to a technical collapse. Maybe you share them with your friends on social media. Sometimes you might order a print or two. But what about all the remaining images you have spent so much time on? You have so many beautiful images carefully stored but what good is that if no one sees them?
The person described is me. For the last ten years or so my images have been silently lurking on my numerous carefully guarded storage sites. I participate in a monthly photo group where we admire and gently critique each other’s photos. I sometimes share on social media but that is as far as it goes. I have all these wonderful pictures that no one ever sees. I never considered taking things any further until, under the mentorship of a great teacher, I began looking for my identity as an artist. Creating a website was suggested as one way to help clarify my artistic vision. I pretty much didn’t believe I had an artistic vision. I wanted to try a website but had no idea how to get started. I am not very technologically gifted and just felt it would be too hard.Thankfully, that teacher I mentioned started a class where I could learn how to do just that.
Creating a website requires me to choose work to show It also requires me to recognize similarities in the work and create coordinated collections. I want my website to be more than “here are my happy snapshots of my summer vacation”.There is hard work involved in grouping artwork into collections that make sense together. Sequencing so that it is understandable to the viewer is also necessary. But in doing the work I am beginning to see that yes, I do have an artistic vision.I see the similarities in my current work and the growth I have achieved over these past ten or so years. The work is not nearly done but the process is stimulating and exciting. I am beginning to see the art in my work and the direction I want to take. So now I am ready to take that very scary leap of offering a website where others can see my vision.