There is an "introductory" announcement somewhere in this message. Please don't stop reading too soon.
Aside from girls, photography was my biggest passion during junior-high, high-school and early college. I was a photographer on the annual staff during my senior year in high school. I took many basketball pictures for myself, and I even worked for the college newspaper for one semester as a freshman.
So what stopped me from pursing a photography career? Probably my lack of drive had a little to do with it; but a particular person seems to have sealed the deal. When I was a freshman in college, I took two photography classes (the only two offered). One day we had a guest speaker whose father was the owner of a local photography studio. This speaker had gone into business with his father after getting out of college. This "kid" was not much older than I. Before continuing, I must admit that the two or three studios in this town, including the speaker's studio, produced some of the finest landscape and studio photographs I had seen up to that time. This speaker knew how good he was, too, and he emanated conceit every time he opened his mouth. He was also condescending when replying to our (or at least my) questions. I had met such people many times before in this area, so that was no big deal. The difficulty came when he warned us (or me in particular?) not to get into the business if we weren't prepared to invest a lot of money in a photography major and later in the business itself. The implications were (I cannot remember if he said it out loud or not) that we should be really, really good photographers, even at that early age, or it would be pointless to pursue such an expensive career any further. That was easy for him to say, I thought. His father had done all of the heavy investing in order to start the studio that he was now working in (his college education was probably paid for by his father also).
Naturally, as a freshmen, I was not wealthy. I couldn't afford an expensive college. Furthermore, I figured I was not half as good a photographer as our conceited guest speaker. So, without actually making a conscious decision, I just slowly lost the will to pursue a career as a photographer (although the desire was still there). By that time, I had many irons in the career fire, anyway, so it didn't bother me too much to toss one of them out. What was one less career goal?
I didn't stop taking pictures, though. In fact, I took vast amounts of them year after year. I took them at home, at college basketball games, out in nature, etc. I don't know why I never tried harder to work for a newspaper or magazine, even without a degree in photography. I guess life just kept leading me in meaningless directions (like a tumbleweed blowing in the wind).
Then Came Digital Photography
A year and half ago, I bought my first digital camera, a 4MP Nikon CoolPix 4300. If only such cameras had existed when I was a freshman in college. My career path would almost certainly have been decided. For that matter, if only iMovie had existed then too... Sigh...
When I bought my camera, I was living all alone on that isolated ranch in Wyoming; therefore, my picture-taking opportunities were somewhat limited. The situation has been no better here in western Nebraska. For that reason, I have taken hundreds of pictures of nature and quite a few of cats. Why cats? Because they make great subjects, and they never protest. Most importantly of all, they were handy.
You Are Invited...
So, without further ado, I hereby cordially invite you to visit MY NEW FLICKR ACCOUNT (the link will always be in my sidebar). I've been intending to set one up for months, but, until this week, I wasn't in the mood to select and resize so many images (the originals are five or six times as large as those that appear on Flickr; however I had storage limitations to consider, etc.).
Be sure to click on the sets named "Sunrise Fog" and "Sunset at Scotts Bluff Monument." Also be sure to click on the various "tag" links. I created a lot of alternate sets by using tags. After clicking on each thumbnail, be sure to scroll down to the "Additional Information" section and click on "See different sizes." Then click on the "largest" option.
You may even find an image (a single image) that contains several different shots of yours truly. :-P
Not counting my photo, I hope you enjoy the show.
