Truth Be Told

The real reason why I haven’t posted regularly before now is because I lacked confidence in my abilities as a photographer. I’ve been putting on a confident front and I guess it shows in my previous posts. I call myself a photographer, but don’t know how to use a manual camera. Not really. I have a DSLR camera – that’s a digital manual camera, but I just used the presets mostly and don’t even use it anymore. I’ve taken classes, but not for a long time. People ask me what’s a good camera to get and I just tell them whatever feels comfortable in their hands. They start getting technical with me and my eyes glaze over. I politely lead them to Samy’s camera or any other camera store and tell them to talk to a sales person there. They can help. They know more than I do about all the fancy equipment and the buttons. Almost all of my pictures on my site are taken with a point and shoot camera. I loved Canon for years until their settings changed to match Instagram. I don’t want “toy camera” effect. I want low light and sunset settings. So, I recently switched to a Nikon Coolpix, which has the sunset setting and some other good ones I like such as, pet portrait and night portrait. The food and museum settings are fun. The museum one just turns off the flash for you, which is nice when I turn on and off my camera to sneak a picture I’m not supposed to take. If my camera is on regular auto, the flash turns on automatically if I forget to turn it off.

The other reason why I haven’t posted regularly is because I am afraid people will steal my photos. So, I “publish” them first on my website that won’t let anyone cut and paste or copy my photos. That way, if I ever found my photo somewhere I hadn’t authorized, I could prove that I published it first. This has never happened, yet. Then I can post on other social media sites and this blog. The website has the watermark built in, but I haven’t taken the time to put watermarks on all of my photos because I have so many pictures and am overwhelmed by the amount of work and time it would take to do that. Help! I take pictures with my cell phone all the time too, but only post family/friends’ snapshots. I never post my photos of the flowers or other nature I see on my walks from my phone because they aren’t “published” first.

My family and friends think I have talent, so I am encouraged by them. And, my photos were selected at the OC Fair in 2014 and 2015. But, it’s only a hobby even though I call it my business and have been losing money on it for years.

I just published my first book with Balboa Press. A real book! You can find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Balboa Press. There’s a long story to this book. I think I talked about it in past posts. The bottom line about the long story is that the first self publishing company I started with went out of business and the other one that took over as a favor dropped my project after three years of waiting for them to do something. So, I created my book on Shutterfly myself. Unfortunately they are way too expensive and I could never actually sell books at those prices, let alone afford to buy them myself! My mother bought five copies for my immediate family. Thankfully, I found Balboa Press and pursued my dream of publishing my book. I never gave up.

Well, this is what’s inside my brain at the moment. Maybe I’ll be more upbeat tomorrow. Thanks for reading!