Hello, interwebs! It’s great to be back. Back? you say? This is your inaugural post. Here at UbikPhotography.com, sure, but I’m an old-school blogger going all the way back to 2003. This was a time where only half the households in America had internet access, DSL was the king of the hill, and I was running my own blogging software because content management systems like WordPress were a) primitive beasts, and b) just starting to appear (WordPress debuted a month and a half after my first post).

It was also a different time personally and creatively and I will NOT be revisiting any of my old posts. There aren’t enough fainting chairs in the country for that kind of madness.

So why begin anew? There are several reasons for jumping into the photoblogging scene, circa 2016:

1) I enjoy writing. I was the nerd throughout college who inwardly did a fist-pump when I saw a term paper of twenty pages or longer in the syllabus. My specialty is non-fiction: I have a BA in History and an MA in Museum Studies, so writing dry, persuasive text is my forte. But I am also a huge smart-ass, which doesn’t mesh well with, say, the traditional tone of a historical monograph or business proposal. Since 2013 I have been responsible for creating extremely short-form work as a social media producer for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, which also needed to remain smart-ass-free.

So in order to scratch that particular itch I have always indulged in more personal (read: generally snarky in tone and peppered with four-letter Anglo-Saxonisms) writing in one form or another. This e-zine will give me the opportunity to create the melange of style and substance that I (and, ideally, my readers) enjoy. And what better way to indulge in a passion than to do it for free!?

Maybe I should re-think this…

I am a recent mirrorless convert. Moving to North Carolina in 2013 uprooted me in more ways than one. For starters I traded in a major metropolitan area for a decidedly more rural one. Gone were the cityscapes, monuments, and memorials where I first learned to shoot. I recognized early that I was no good as a landscape/nature photographer and thanks to the miracle of geography I didn’t have to deal with it.

Until I moved south. Now the big, heavy pro-grade camera rig that I lugged all over DC and Baltimore felt, well, big and heavy. I felt adrift, surrounded by subjects I just wasn’t good at. At the same time, the mirrorless camera market was maturing and the lure of a more portable rig became extremely appealing. I’ll leave the details about how I came to my decision for a later article, but in short: the move to mirrorless has been a huge creative awakening and I have a lot to say on the subject.

I enjoy talking about my artwork. Photography is an intensely personal pursuit and I enjoy few things more than talking about my work and how and why I created a particular image. Some have stories behind them, some have none at all, and a handful are total rejects whose value I only noticed years after the fact. Those are my favorites.

I want to make a lot of money. And hey, if the arts isn’t the path to limitless wealth, I don’t know what is!

I may have to rethink this, too…

So let’s begin, shall we?!