For every photographer, a blog.

According to the marketing experts, we all have to have blogs now.  I am sure that somewhere along the way, I will have to hunt down an article telling me how to get people to read your blog, but for now let’s deal with the one that got me here, marketing a photography business.  They all say it, you gotta have a blog now.  Fair enough.

Why I am a photographer…

That is my grandmother.  In this photo (which I made) she is outside of the post office she worked at most of my life, getting a photo before she retired.  I made this one an early Canon Rebel DSLR which was already showing it’s age, but it was my first DSLR.  As far as photography goes, there is not a lot to be said for this picture.  It isn’t composed very well, it is of silly low quality because I admit to knowing nothing at that time about digital photo quality.  It is exposed well enough to document my grandmother in front of the post office, and that is all it was supposed to do.

That is (one of the) lessons my grandmother taught me.  For every situation, make sure there are photographs of it…usually video too.  She leaves nothing undocumented, not even the tiniest event.  Family members being in a room together on an uneventful Tuesday is reason enough for her to pull her camera out.  I took that to heart.  It is where I was first introduced to the camera.  Later one of my childhood crushes reinforced the idea that cameras are cool…

Before I learned the first thing about photography, I was passionate about always having a camera on me.  From that first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 110, to the blister pack camera they gave me in high school because the German exchange students were coming, to that first digital which went to Iraq with me, it all leads to today.  It all started with the love of taking pictures though.

Do you have that?  Do you have a love of taking pictures and that is why you are considering going deeper with your photography?  It is enough to start with.  Run with that.  You need that more than you need overly fancy equipment that it may take you years to figure out.

It took years, but I combined my passion for photography itself with my grandmother’s iron clad will to document our lives, and I have made those things into the idea of why I am a photographer.  I want to leave something behind, and I want to do it with a camera in my hand.

This was my grandfather.  In the summer of 2018 I went to visit him while I was home and I was afraid that it would be the last time that I saw him, so I carried my camera with me.  As he called it “my fancy camera.”  It was just a canon T2i equipped with a 50mm f/1.8 lens, but it did not take film and it had a screen, so to him it was fancy.  He never really complained about having his photograph taken, but he did not really care for it, and he did not actively participate.  The face he is making is a direct consequence of the fact that I was clicking away while we were talking.  He did not mention it, he just kept going, probably chalking it up to me being like my grandmother.

I have no regrets or thoughts really about whether he liked it or not.  I made these portraits of him.  I was wrong though, I did get to see him again, two times in the year 2019, once while we moved and once when I went home in the summer again.  Neither time did I get to make his portrait like this.  He stayed inside the whole of each visit, his condition much worse than in 2018.  He died on December 6th 2019.  I have no regrets with it.  I could have called more, but he did not like talking on the phone.  I could not have visited more than I did, I went every time I was home.  Most importantly, I did make the photos.  He never told me no, so I made them and now I have them.  Make the photo.  Is this blog full of technical advice? No.  Is it a little bit within 1000 words to tell you why I do what I do?  Yes!  I like the personal side.  I hope you do to.

Thank you for reading, and stay tuned.  I hope to bring real content as we go along.

Brandon Bledsoe