6.28.05

Tonight I find myself in an unfamiliar situation; one of anticipation. For what you ask? I have no earthly idea is the answer. Well, that last line was more poetry than truth.

You see, a few months ago I got fed up with the software I was using to put photos up on my website. It was just sad that the collective minds and pocketbooks of microsoft, adobe, and macromedia couldn't come up with a system that didn't make my galleries look like my mom created them. No offense, mom. So I spent the next couple of nights and I started writing a little flash app for myself which does most of the work for me. It came out so nice that I let a few of my friends use it for their pics.

To make a long story short, about a month later I read a column in Shutterbug, which is one of the big photography magazines, about a piece of online gallery software that was no better, if more complicated than my little tool, which I called PhotoFolio. So I walked over to my computer and on a lark wrote to Joe Farace, the author of the column.

And that brings us back to today, when I opened my mailbox and pulled out my very own copy of the August 2005 issue of Shutterbug where on page 34 there was a half a page about yours truly, complete with a screenshot of my online gallery and where to download it to try it for your self.

So what am I waiting in anticipation for? I'm not sure. The magazine has a circulation of about 100,000 copies, which means that I should probably expect a lot of "I installed your damn software and now my server refuses to send email" emails. If only 1% of the readers go look at my work, that's another 1000 people who wouldn't have gone to my site otherwise. I realize I'm not a great photographer yet, but I'm working on it. And a couple of thousand other photographers looking at my work can only help my exposure. As they say, there's no such thing as bad publicity.

The good thing is that anticipation in general tends to surprise you in the most interesting ways. Dare I say, in ways you can't anticipate. Leading you down a path you never knew was there. As Robert Pirsig put it:

".you start looking laterally. That's a word he later used to describe a growth of knowledge that doesn't move forward like an arrow in flight, but expands sideways, like an arrow enlarging in flight, or like the archer, discovering that although he has hit the bull's eye and won the prize, his head is on a pillow and the sun is coming in the window."

So here's to anticipation and to wherever it may lead.