If you're reading this, and I seriously doubt that you are, welcome to my blog. I realize that the web doesn't really need another self-absorbed, navel-gazing photography blog, but I'm going to publish one anyway. Why, you might ask? Before I became an aspiring photographer, I was an aspiring writer. Again, not too unique, I know. In this blog, I'd like to explore the connection between the two. It seems that a lot of photographers dabble in writing, and a lot of writers dabble in photography.I believe that there is a connection somewhere deep, and I'd like to mine it. I think that writing can improve my photography and vice-versa.The key to doing both well is practice, plain and simple. If one can feed the other, then I might move one step closer to a kind of creative perpetual-motion in which I no longer need to prod myself to action.

About connections, since I'm being self-absorbed, I might as well go deeper and explain a little more. My grandfather was a photographer all his life. He was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1890. He moved to Indiana in the 1920's and set up a studio which he ran, first with his brother, then with my father, for a good 3 quarters of the 20th century until he passed away.I was never interested in photography, but in writing, and that's what I studied when I was younger. It wasn't until I moved to Japan that I took up a camera. I was inspired there, both by the beautiful country and by it's people and their work ethic. Photography allowed me to document it's mysterious temples, craggy shorelines, it's innumerable pubs and quirks. There many people are dedicated to self-improvement, pushing themselves in their hobbies and careers in ways that many Americans probably think extreme.This was not and is not now, me, but it certainly made me think. Examine. Pontificate. Navel-gaze. What did I care about enough to try and push myself to do? The answer was photography. It had replaced writing as my medium of choice for whatever I wanted to say. I looked at schools in Japan and the U.S., and Massachusetts kept popping back up. I'd never been there, never even thought about going there before, but it seemed like most of the schools I was interested in were all there, in and around Boston, and all only a few miles away from where my Grandfather studied photography about a 100 years earlier. Of course I was aware of this connection, but it hit home in a visceral way while I was standing on a street corner in Belmont, MA, with my camera and tripod at six in the morning. Belmont is a small city on the outskirts of Boston, and it has a hometown,USA feeling that is many years removed from the strip malls and beaches of Florida where I grew up. My Grandfather earned his living with portraits, but it was his street photography that he clearly loved, and somehow I had wound up doing the same thing about a century later. In the blood? Subconscious suggestions from my childhood? No idea.

I put up the picture I took that morning up (with some help from CS4) as the first photograph on my blog, not because I think it's good, but because for me it represents that connection. It illustrates my point. On this blog I may put up photos that I'm proud of, but I suspect I'll be putting up many failures as well. You learn more from failure than from success, right? I have a lot more learning to do. Writing came easy to me but I was always very lazy about the whole process. Photography has come slowly to me, with thousands of photos of shite behind the few photos that I actually like. If you've taken the time to read this far then take a little more time to make a comment.Tell me you like something, tell me you think I suck, either is fine, but be sure to tell me why. To complete my pomposity, a quote from Hemingway: "Now it is necessary to get to the grindstone again."