Toni and I have been driving around taking pictures of stuff for about eight years, now. Just now, I was surfing through a folder of snaps from back then. The RAW pictures, not the smooth, edited and filtered stuff that you see from me these days.
And I realized something. I present myself as the product of almost sixty years of experience behind the camera, as well as a career spent as a commercial artist serving the music business.
But it’s not that simple. Looking at those pix from 2018, I realize I was pretty raw (not the file format) and something of a newbie. Yeah, I had the eye and the practice at putting images together in a frame. But, despite all that went before, I didn’t actually deliver with the good images. I was less practiced. Less confident. And it showed.
And it can be seen in another thing. The number of shots. As recently as three-to-five years ago, I would go out for a weekend and shoot over a thousand pictures. The last time we took a road trip — to West Virginia in June, I shot just over two hundred pictures in four days. And of those, only 75 of them did I consider worth the effort to do post production on.
I’d say that implies that I’ve gotten better at selecting images I might be attracted to, but subsequently reject for one reason or another — in split-second decisions.
Back in 2020, I started with Art Storefronts and, within six months, I had a store up and on the web.
To date, it has sold … nothing.
That’s not because the work isn’t there. It’s because I haven’t yet done enough with it.
That’s about to change.
I’m putting in the work now to take a website that has just been standing out there in the field and turn it into something that actually works. Part of that means building a clientele. At first, that may just be the curious — people who stop by and say, “Just looking.” Friends. Neighbors. Colleagues. But my hope is that some of you will become customers.
So I’m throwing a kind of open house and inviting all and sundry to visit the store if you haven’t already, and to see the changes I’m making. I’m tempted to say “we,” because I’m working with an AI, and that partnership will become more evident as I continue updating the site and adding more recent photographs to the inventory.
So, herewith, I invite you to visit my establishment and have a look around. In time there will be prizes and discounts, news of our travels, and bits about the art.
I hope to add a little beauty to your lives as I chase the light down the road.