This one's for blogger

Ever since I linked this blog to Facebook I have had to filter that kind of stuff I say here.

This one's for the flickr and blogger fans that follow this blog independent of Facebook :)

Seriously though. I blog for me (and indirectly you). I keep a Facebook fanpage because I have to (i.e. for marketing purposes). But since my FB fanpage is tied to my actual FB account, people I know in real life get to read these rather "personal" blog posts. That makes me nervous. In that sense I'm an "arms-length kind of guy". I try not to blog about realtime events because it potentially sets me up to fail. What if I called FORD and they said no? Now the whole world knows I'm a failure. I don't want that :)

When I first started blogging it was literally a track record of the stuff that I was learning and the stuff I thought was interesting insofar as the topics pertained to photography. I could talk. I could vent. I could bitch about stuff like Photoshop. I could upload crappy pictures. I could be technical without the fear of "losing" my audience. I can't do that anymore because my audience is no longer comprised of people I've never met and that bugs the shit out of me. It feels like the people I know in real life are encroaching on my privacy. I don't want people to know that much about me...

Yet as I write this, I know the above statement isn't 100% true. I don't have to have a FB profile. And even with my FB account more than 50% of my "friends" are people whom I have never met or never spoken/written a word to. As far as privacy is concerned, I choose to put myself into the "webosphere" (because I'm a narcissist) but I could just keep things to myself. But really, what would be the fun in that? So really I'm a schizophrenic narcissist.

But what have I wanted to say that I've been bottling up for so long? I dunno. Nothing really. I just wanted to vent for venting's sake. LOL! :) How about I put things in bullet points as usual?

-FORD has agreed to pay me for testing their models. The day they told me I was really happy. But then that feeling went away.

-I shot a lookbook this past weekend. Old news now since I already blogged about it in the previous post. The designer is a model-turned-designer and incidentally one of the first models I ever shot from ModelMayhem.com

-I'm talking to a few companies about becoming an in-house photographer. I can't tell you who they are yet... partially because I don't know the name of one of the companies. The other you'd know if I told you...

-I'm going to Taipei in 2.5 hours. I'm actually writing this from the EVA lounge at LAX. I'll be there for 10 days and hopefully get to talk to a few people within the industry. Beyond that I hope to put some distance between myself and the work.

-Speaking of "work" things have really picked up lately with paid tests from random models, mostly people finding me from ModelMayhem.com. Busy is good. Busy pays the bills.

-I just decorated the entrance/makeup room to the studio. I have 10-12 framed pictures of different models (lots of beauty shots) hanging on the walls. It reminds me of Rome because when you walk through Rome you often see random statues (often just the heads). The framed pictures lend themselves to a higher level of "legitimacy". While technically nothing has changed, the images elevate the perception of the studio a thousand-fold. There's something impressive about being surrounded by beautiful faces. I plan on filling the entire room with framed pictures.

-I've gotten tired of my recent images. I've been on a learning tear but I'm starting to plateau. It's good that this coincides with my trip because I routinely need time away to reevaluate my learning process and digest everything that I've been doing. It's important to reflect and then build upon that knowledge to grow even more. Getting bored just means I'm on the brink of change. And like Barack Obama said "You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig." or his better known quote, "...our time for change has come" :)

So this one's for you guys. I might "disconnect" this blog from FB for a while just so I can speak freely about stuff like the good ole' days :)