Recently someone who was giving a talk on photography noted that I have been posting a photograph every day for a long time. His guess was that I had been doing so for about four of five years. I told him that I thought that it has been longer than this, but I wasn’t sure how long.
Morning Light, Zabriskie Point. Death Valley National Park. April 4, 2004. © Copyright 2004 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved. (Originally posted April 5, 2006.)
Judging from some records I just looked up, I think I may have been doing this since early April 2006! Some of those earliest posts are still there, but the photographs have gone missing — in the course of moving the website between different hosts and transferring the content from one content management system to another some of the early content was lost.
(This was not the first photograph shared I posted online — I was blogging in the mid-1990s, and posting photographs not long afterward. It is a bit scary to think of how many thousands of photographs I must have posted by now!)
My friend (the “someone” mentioned above) was pointing to this history in the context of practice, something that I think is tremendously important in photography. He and I share extensive background and training in music, where the importance of practice is obvious, and where practicing is assumed.
Many understand the importance of practice in photography but too many perhaps don’t, and they hope to learn to make photographs on the basis of thinking about it or reading about it or looking at a lot of photographs. Those things are all important and good, but nothing replaces “doing the work,” taking a camera out there and making a lot of photographs — not mindlessly, but with a sense of curiosity and purpose and a desire to learn from the process. The goal is to tune up the process of seeing, to develop a fundamental base of experience to draw on, to learn from (many!) mistakes, and to make the process of seeing and photographing ever more fluid and intuitive.
The discipline of sharing a photograph every day — and, no, I do not make a photograph every day — has been and is my “practice time” and, like the practicing I did when I was an active musical performer, it keeps my visually on edge and pushes me forward.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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To add a bit of information about my blogging and posting history…
I operated my first web server in late 1994, using MacHTTP on a desktop Macintosh on a college network. The initial site was for my teaching, though it was also a test bed for learning about how the web worked and for creating web pages. Within a few years I moved to a content management system (running on the same sort of computer) called Frontier (or Manila, depending…) that was optimized for blogging. (Such sites were then called “web logs.”) I included visual images all along, but I think it was in the early 2000s when I began to regularly include my own photography, at first as part of a website called “Dan’s Outside” that focused on hiking and backpacking but which soon (2003?) began to morph into a photography site.