CharlesSmithPhotography.com is online and active, as of yesterday, 7/16/2017. I spent the better part of last night tagging, naming and uploading photos to the galleries, mainly to become familiar with how the website management system works. I am, very slowly, beginning to figure it out. I have built several websites, from scratch, using html, java and css, but I lack both the time and desire to try and re-teach myself how to code. I decided that this time, I would just use a pre-made template, designed for photography websites. This made things much easier, but there is still a learning curve, and there are certain changes that I would like to make with some of the navigation and styles, but that would require coding, and there is that whole "time and desire" thing again. Anyway, the site is up and functional, so there is one small victory, and I even have some photos online!
Here is a photo that I took on my way home from South Texas. This is the old church in Panna Maria, TX.
Over the next few days/weeks, I will be uploading more images and removing some that I don't like as much, so things will be in a constant state of change until I am done. I would also like to mention that I am not, by nature, a "blogger," so writing is not something that I am used to doing. I will do my best, but it may take some time to get used to the idea of writing, since I haven't really done much of it since my college days.
A little background information on me:
My day job is working as a civil engineer, which keeps me pretty busy, so I have to do the whole photography thing in my spare time. When I was in my early 20's, I worked for a photography studio, which was owned by a very talented photographer. He let his kids do most of the studio work, while he and his wife travelled around to art shows and various locations to take photographs. I learned how to do custom framing and how to operate the photo processing/developing equipment in the shop. I did not own a camera when I started working there, but I had a nice 35mm SLR after a short time. I guess this is where I developed an interest in photography. Prior to that, my artistic interests were centered on painting and drawing, which I had done for most of my life, up to that point. After I left that job, I mostly used the camera to take pictures of landscape and old barn scenes that I wanted to paint. Shortly after this time, I joined the US Army and began a new chapter in my life, and both photography and art were left by the wayside, until I was deployed to Hungary, in support of the Bosnia Peacekeeping mission. I taught classes in the mornings, and had the afternoons all to myself, with absolutely nothing to do. I found a new 35mm SLR camera in the local Exchange, so I bought it and signed up to take an online photography course from the New York Institute of Photography. For the next 6 months of my tour, I worked my way through about 3/4 of the course. When I returned to Germany, after my tour was over, life got in the way again, so I did not complete the NYIP course. I have kept up with dabbling in photography through the years, and even upgraded to a nice digital SLR camera, which, in my opinion, is much better than the old film cameras. In Hungary, I would have to wait almost a week to get my prints back, when I sent them off to be developed! Fast-forward to the present.... I still like to take pictures, and I would like to make the photos that I take even better, so I have re-enrolled in the "new and improved" NYIP course, which is all done online now. I had to start all over again, but it has been a good refresher course up to this point. I am also a bit older now, and more driven to achieve results, thanks to the Army and 20 years of life's lessons, so I am getting more out of the course this time around.
Since I am not a "professional" photographer, my goals are a little different. I make photographs as a hobby, because I enjoy the hunt for a good image, sort of like one of my other hobbies, deer hunting, where the experience and the thrill of the chase is all that matters. Photography, like deer hunting and all of my other hobbies, is an expensive undertaking, so hopefully I will be able to sell a photograph every now and then to help offset some of the cost of entry. Anyway, I wrote way more than I intended to in this initial blog post, so I will sign off until next time. If you made it all of the way through this post, thanks for reading!
Charles