What are you doing when you take a picture?

In Response to re: recording history : [QUOTE]Java It's great the way you have been documenting culture, activities, artifacts, infrastructure, and architechure. I learned a lot about the area from your pictures. Many are splendidly beautiful pictures. Posted by Art_Wannabe[/QUOTE] Glad you have enjoyed all those photos. Unfortunately without the custom tags they were attached to at the old site this made them nearly impossible (without a whole lot of time and patience on one's hands) to hunt for if I had transferred my whole gallery over to here as their order within over 1400 pictures would have made the world's largest corn maze look like child's play by comparison. With those custom tags all related photos could be brought together with a single mouse click, and even interrelated photos under another single mouse click. It reminded me of having highly select access chosen at the simple push of a single button while looking over the waters of a great sea of vast volumes of photos and information connected together by the six degrees of separation. One simple click brough all relevant content onto a single page (or list of pages). Over here since there are no custom tag options all these photos and info would have become completely lost. *sigh* Its unfortunate that others wont be able to explore those tags and all the images and info attached - it was so simple there. Over here I feel as though I have entered deep into the stone ages and have constructed the very first wheel on the planet and am wondering to myself what good is it when it always gets away from me when it's on the side of a hill? Originally when I first got here I tried remedying this by posting key sequences of pictures with my first subject of choice on a long list, The Endor Iron Furnace, in back to back order drawn from one of my tags over there only to have the comments area under one of the photos get heavily spammed and it seemed there was no means of getting rid of spam comments by the mods or myself, therefore I deleted the whole sequence after it sat there for nearly a week after posting my complains (which fell on deaf ears) and then later reposted these photos and related info back into their original back to back order again - lost a bunch of star ratings (as well as placements in the viewers lists, ect) in the process but it was better than the alternative of leaving them spammed. Since then I have given up on the idea of putting so much work and effort into transferring all my old photos over to here in an easy to follow manner only to have them potentially spammed again so now its just random key pictures (probably only 1% of what was over there) being reposted here - still not done yet as I dont want to bury other people's photos too deep too quickly. During the meantime I am also posting current pictures as well too. Ah... the Land of Confusion! (and a few missing wheels too) LOL

When I first became interested in photography my main 'driver' was to record history by taking well composed snapshots of various places (and other subjects) that I thought either were not going to be around much longer or were about to become something much bigger in the future. A quarter century later I look back at my old photos and think - How true! How true!! Glad I had the foresight to snap those photos (many of which are the only known ones in existance.) There are a few that I missed though, such as the old steel bridge that once graced Lassiter Mill Road in Raleigh. If I was just a little older back then and knew the right contacts I would have pushed really hard to try to get this steel bridge preserved as a pedestrian bridge for use as a centerpiece for a small park but alas... *sigh* ...and I never even thought to snap a photo either as I had become so accustomed to seeing it that it never dawned upon me that its days were numbered. Anyway, now fast forward a quarter century later and I find my 'drivers' have evolved beyond simply recording history but updating it too, and add to this a whole cornucopia of other 'drivers' that ranged from what I called photo-blogging (recording a whole sequence of events in pictures enough that no words were needed other than naming the place or event -- this all happened after I grew tired of blogging because it ate up way too much time - much simpler to snap a bunch of key pictures and post them in sequence into an online album). Then after many of the online image hosting sites went belly-up I lost interest in photo-blogging and my main 'driver' nowadays is what I like to call 'The Look'. It is difficult to explain in words what 'The Look' is exactly but the best I can describe it is, in my own words 'You'll know it when you see it.' - that one scene that captures the most content with 'content' being either artistic, information, or a combination thereof. As for other 'drivers' another fave of mine is simply going out and taking a bunch of random shots without paying a whole lot of conscious attention to composing the pictures, but simply snapping on impulse when even a hint of 'The Look' suggests itself. Then later on I will sort through all those random shots while viewing them 'full screen' to see what golden nuggets will turn up. It's kinda like a treasure hunt. Sometimes I get whole cards full of duds, but other times I find lots of surprises! Just the tip of the proverbial iceburg here... I could go on, and on, and on...