Flickr.com changed my life...

Just a couple months ago toward the end of June I discovered Flickr.com and my life hasn't been the same since. The reason I say that flickr changed my life is because prior to getting into photography as an art I had no real passion, not one that was truly mine. I do love movies and music and sometimes really love creating custom burned CDs for my friends -- you know, with songs that I thought they would like, but that's it. My life was all about observing.

My dad has always been VERY artistic, with drawing and painting and photography. I got into drawing and was ok at it but had no patience to commit to really getting better. Now photography is something I've always tried to get into, except that the "art" light just hadn't quite ever found me; my snapshots always felt like they were lacking that something special.

It all really started with my Sweet. HE had a blog and so he regularly encouraged me to start with a blog of my own because he enjoyed his so much. So I did start this very blog and the wheels of fate were set in motion.

One day I was browsing around searching for some kind of helpful site or something to answer a question on the functions of the blog itself and ran into a page that really grabbed me:

http://tlltworld.blogspot.com/

It was full of the most incredible images that grouped together in warm, visual sequences and paired with just the right words made warm, touching stories. The posts were a captivating browse. What I didn't expect was a strange feeling of absence the next day, a need to go back and experience that wonder again. I looked around and found that there was no easy way to locate the page and the search became a quest. Every moment that I could for the next couple days I worked the search engines with every possible variety of the title "TLLT" or "Things look like things". The quest became a dare and the dare became an obsession to beat the damn search engines into submission and squeeze that site address out of the internet. Yes, it became a little personal: me vs. the machine.

And after all that -- how did I find it, you ask. Ah, it was a matter of sheer luck. It was that Blogger page, the Blogger home page or whatever, that I happened upon while logging in to this page. Something at the bottom right corner of the page caught my eye. It was the "blog of note" list and then I realized that this is where I had run into the page in the first place! OMG -- there it was! WHAT a relief. I FOUND it. After THREE days of desperation, and useless battling with the internet I had found it. AGAIN. And it was right there on my front door...

It was great to immerse myself in the page again, soaking in the beauty of the joined images sprinkled with stories. This new concept was so inspiring to me that I just had to start my very own picture blog. That's when I got into looking at pics on Flickr. All of the pictures for the "TLLT" (Things Look Like Things, btw) blog had come from there. So I opened an account and started hunting for images to post.

At first I just wrote simple, poetic descriptions or interpretations of pictures that sparked a story in my mind. Then came the "micro-stories". These are written like little excerpts from the page of a book, just a little glimpse, a moment in time of that character's fictional life. It developed from there and became a place where my joys of emotive words and visual beauty could come together.

Immediately I began collecting the amazing photos that came my way, art displayed in just a little color and light in the screen. After that I started considering my own collection of images, those snapshots of so many years piled into a bag in the closet. Some of them were actually interesting, with a little cropping and a lot of computer adjustments there were actually some photos to post. These were of course cat pics, my feet, whatever. Surprisingly a couple groups found me and invited me to their galleries. Yeah, they were cat galleries, which I later would learn are the bane of "real" photographers existence, but it was an invitation and it was fun. THEN I got inspired by all those great people with the abstract stuff, the textures and colors. I started experimenting to get some abstract photos of my own and got hooked. THAT's when I discovered my real passion. It was a feeling of rare satisfaction, of accomplishment in creativity that I had never ever felt before. EVER. It was GREAT!!

That's what I mean by saying that Flickr changed my life. Posting my picks and getting comments from the people online who care enough to give feedback and support is a very amazing and unique experience. Then, at the same time and by pure chance as well I found a local photo club JUST starting out. It was announced on CraigsList in a section I never would have looked at, never mind that I had never really used that website before. It was easy to contact them, get the information on the club and then attend the first meeting. They're an interesting bunch, might learn a lot and it's fun.

So it really all started with my Sweet. If he hadn't gotten me into Blogger and there hadn't been a certain "Blog of Note" and I hadn't found it again on accident and hadn't started my own page who knows if I would have ever discovered my passion for photography beyond just observation. What a treasure it has been for me to discover what it means to create. I can create stories and images and it is a source of joy. A SOURCE OF JOY!!! You just can't put a price on that, can you? = ]