growyourwings | Entries tagged with social media

Random aside: WOW Is it RAINING much??!!!

It's been a very long summer. All kind of a blur. I'm one of those people who gets energized by Fall. It sparks my creative energy. I put in likely 15 hours yesterday doing long overdue work on my photography business. So I'm feeling accomplished and while a tad bit tired, not exhausted at all. I think back to 2008 when I was considering launching my own business. Photography was not on the list of potentials back then. I felt like I was moving through sludge to try to figure out what and how and if I even wanted to do it. And the answer kept coming back NO.

What is the line by John Lennon, "Life is what happens when you are making other plans?" This feels something like that. I've always loved photography. I almost majored in it back in college, but didn't for many reasons. Mostly (but not only) because frankly back then darkroom work bored and frustrated me. Way too slow and cumbersome. (Ironic now because I'm considering enrolling in a darkroom class; which would be my first since I was about 19 years old.) I received my first camera when I was about 7 or 8 years old. It was a Brownie. I'm pretty sure it was this one below. I can still remember opening the package. When my daughter was born I was constantly taking photos of her with our Canon EOS film camera. Bob was always telling me to stop taking photos because I was "wasting film!" I cataloged all my negatives and marked the back of all prints with the cataloged negative reference numbers.

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But still. Doing photography on a professional basis never occurred to me in 2008. It's been so gradual. And while it has not been effortless. It *feels* like it's effortless.

While I'm not done, I spent a good deal of time yesterday resolving several issues I had with my two main photography websites. While I still have some tweaking, I'm pretty happy with them right now. Plus all of my various sites and social media sites are not somewhat hooked together.

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( Screen shots of websites/social media sites... )

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One of the allures of Tumblr I think is that you appear to get a lot more response to posts. Tumblr enables a quick "like" and reblog function which can get your posts spreading around a lot via people you don't know. As I've been playing more in Tumblr and thinking about the LJ vs. Tumblr comparison, I've begun to think that for those of us who are not fandom's writers, but it's visual artists, Tumblr may offer a bit more feedback satisfaction. And then there's the fact that for whatever reasons, Tumblr is so much more active for SPN than LJ seems to be these days. Even if the activity might be a bit OTT or youngish or whatever or Cas vs. Sam focused - at least people are reacting and talking - as opposed to the silence that seems to have descended over LJ.

Don't get me wrong, I still see LJ as my fandom homebase. My real community. I'm just venturing out further and exploring and bringing back. :)

Tumblr is not the place for in depth conversations or getting to know-you's. I am seeing that relationships form there and perhaps it's just a matter of getting used to the different behavior of Tumblr, but it still does seem to me to as good as LJ for forming a more "connected" community.

But there is something to be said for finding two of my photos on Tumblr with more likes/reblogs than I've ever seen on LJ.

I did not go back to verify this, but I'm pretty sure this photo below is an enhanced version of the one I uploaded. It appears to have been "Tumblrized" with increased saturation and color filters.