Fun vs. profession in photography

Frozen strawberry leaves, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Paul Lester wrote about the reasons for a photographer to publish a blog. He was referring to a list of 11 reasons why you should do so, and most of the reasons had to do either with a) making money or b) becoming famous.

Of the 11 reasons Paul referred to only one seems to be on the spot for me: “To have fun!” The others are not really my thing.

Paul suggested another two reasons: 1) it can be an interesting account of your life … somewhat autobiographical, 2) to share your vision of the world and visit others to see what their vision is.

These two reasons are relevant to me as well. So how I have three reasons for having a blog about photography.

Perhaps a fourth reason would be “To commit to developing my skills”, because having the blog record makes it possible to see how the photography evolves, and there is also a positive pressure to make each day a mark of progress. One step (or blog post) at a time…

What I don't want to happen is that photography becomes too serious. That happened with my writing. In my teens I was writing for fun, but also because I wanted to try out whether I could do something like Hemingway. It turned out I was not a talent of that kind, but I managed to do a lot of writing and learned to do it competently.

Later I got interested in various other topics, and wrote articles and columns about those things (science, IT, Mac, technology vs. society etc.). This was fun, but later it turned into work - now I'm at over 600 published texts and several dozen books. However, currently I'm writing things like strategy memos - that is a quite long way away from young Hemingway.

I don't want to turn photography into a profession as well. I know personally a few people who are on the verge of doing just that, and I'm not envious about it - although I sometimes wish I could take as good photographs as they produce.

When I go out for a walk with a camera, it may be that I'm doing a similar thing as I did with writing. I didn't manage to progress with writing until I found topics I wanted to learn and - at the same time - tell the world about. Photography is in this way similar to writing, a way towards personal understanding and a tool for sharing knowledge. Nature is important for me, and I want to learn and share.

When I go for a walk in the nature with a camera, I'm reminded of the long walks I took when I was a teenager. Then I could go on walking for hours - four, five, six hours until I returned home to have a meal. When I got a camera, I used to take that with me on the walks, but didn't take many photos, maybe half a dozen, because I couldn't afford using a lot of film. Now I'm doing much shorter walks, but thanks to digital, I can afford to take many more photos.