i love being a photographer. sure, i bitch about it sometimes, and get frusterated with all logistics of it and all the shit, but i always knew the artist path was for me and most of the time photography fills all the artistic voids i have. most of the time. actually all of the time. except for one: when i am attempting to express some kind of emotion of mine. politics – easy, sexuality – easy, someone else’s emotions – as easy as they make it. but, there is something about portraying a personal feeling that dams up all my photographic juices.

part of it is fear. fear that i will be like all those other cheesy photographers that just try way too hard to portray personal emotion through something conceptual. or fear that i will do another stupid self portrait that looks whiney and pathetic.fear that if i genuinely put myself out there, it’ll just go horribly wrong!

the other part? confusion. i am truly at a loss as to how i would make that happen. i feel like because photography is documentary in nature it is hard to figure out how to turn that into something that a constructed from something so personal, at least while trying to maintain some kind of realness. how do i place myself in an image (both physically or conceptually) without it being over thought. i find that my best photography comes when someone opens up and i am lucky enough to catch it, when they forget for a moment that the camera is there. how am i going to forget the camera and take the picture?

just a random random thought.

What is up with photographers? What is it that makes us so worried about our prices being known. The Internet is full of resources on how to get noticed, how to follow your creativity, guides to social networking, creating your brand, everything! And I still can’t find one good resource or how much to charge! I think this is a huge oversight by the photography community. The great mentors and the great teachers of the photo realm are really pulling the rug out from under us newbs by being vague and unclear about just how much this career choice costs and how much to charge accordingly.

So I have a blog already. It lives at blog.maxwellander.ca . And now I have another one here. I was trying to think about what I would write here that would make it different from my other one, and I discovered the wordpress iPhone app. Huzzah! This will now be my mobile blog. I have been meaning to start capturing all my fleeting idea as they come to me, but I am often defeated by them not being formulated enough. But who knows, maybe making them publically accessable, coupled with the pressure to update another log regularly will help with my idea formation process.

So here’s to catching fleeting thoughts!

Cheers!