chronicled & illustrated

Tobago,
originally uploaded by nuanc.

“Poetry…making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.”
Allen Ginsberg

This photo and this quote coincided in my life today. The photo is one I took four years ago on a wonderful vacation in Tobago. I posted it on flickr two years ago when I was in my first frenzy of uploading. There was something so freeing and new about having my photos online for a lot (or even some) people to see. It was a rush.

I’ve always liked photography and wanted to do more of it, more seriously. Digital photography was the spur I needed to make taking photos a part of daily life. Then flickr came along and I was hooked. It’s changed for me over the two plus years I’ve been a flickr member. Now I upload several photos a week at the most. But for a while, I uploaded EVERYTHING.

The Tobago photos were done before I had a digital camera so I scanned in a few and put them on flickr, too. I was proud of them but knew that the real credit went to the island of Tobago: the land, the light, the sky, the water. It’s possible to take a bad photo there (I know because some of mine were bad) but with so much glorious scenery to work with, I felt I couldn’t go too wrong.

Today a fellow from Germany who’s working on an ad for a “Mexican-style” German beer asked if he could use this photo in a collage. Here’s a mock-up of the ad with my palm tree and sky barely showing in the background:

Of course I said yes. I’m pleased. I’m pleased he found it. I’m pleased he picked it. And more than anything, I’m pleased he asked. As we soon find out if we put anything on the internet, it can easily be taken for free. That he needs a higher resolution may be the reason but whatever it is, he’s offered to pay me for it and I hope he does. If nothing else, I put in a day’s work just trying to get a high resolution scanned on my home scanner!

So what does this have to do with Allen Ginsburg and the quote about poetry? It’s that online photo sites and blogs and so much more, have—for those of us who choose to be involved in it—made our private lives public. It can definitely have a dark, down side to it. But, such as for me today, it also has it’s upside.

My little vacation photo is my first foray into *professional* photography. Whether it’s the last remains to be seen but I’m happy I had the opportunity to make the photo public rather than to have it sitting in a box in a cabinet in my house where no one ever saw it again.

Cheers!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 at 4:02 pm and is filed under processing, photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.