Since I started taking photos in 2003 I've made lots of mistakes. I had to learn the hard way to back up my files twice. So I've lost countless thousands of images that I can never look at again; piles and piles of photos that I won't be able to edit from their original image, like the one you see above. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on me again some more. Fool me three times and I probably ought not even have a camera. I know now to back everything up, and not just to one location.
I've recently uncovered a gigantic cache of all my journals from age twelve to age twenty. I read them all in a night. I also found a good amount of forgotten photos that I'll probably never share because they're not any good, but they certainly jogged my memory. There was also a box of letters from my several years that I valued the art of written correspondence. It's a good thing I have artifacts; there's so much I wouldn't remember on my own, without something to look at.
Getting to the point now, I'm sorting through all my photos from deviantart, which are the only scraps of the four or five years of digital photography that weren't completely lost due to stupid hard drive crashes. They're not good but they're all I have to look at of my beginning years playing with a camera. I'm tired of people finding me via deviantart and judging my work based on what they see there. So I'm saving all those tiny shoddy files to my external and demolishing the whole portfolio. Then I'll pick out all the images that are important to me and put them on flickr, all with their own explanation of their signifigance.
Then I think I'll be ready to get back to actually comitting myself to improving.
Here, for expample, is a portrait from April 18th, 2005. It's out of focus, small, dusty, and poorly framed. It's a photo of my friend, Marcelo, who lives in Chile. This is the kind of portrait which takes one to the presice moment it was shot as opposed to being a more basic image which reminds you of the subject in general. We all have photos like that. I think they're usually crap photos that do that to us; make us relive the time before and after the shutter opened.
A friend of mine told me about the time he was twenty-five and burned every recorded memory of himself, in order to start completely over. I don't particulary want to do that. I would, however, like to scrutinize all of it one last time, put it all back in a box, and press on.
Keep an eye out on flickr.
