Why photography and why not something else?

I don't really know the answer to that one? I guess I'm a pretty visual kind of person. I love color and plenty of it.

I was given my first camera by my grandmother and it was a Kodak 126 that took cartridge film. The film was really 35mm but with different sprocket holes, encased in a plastic drop-in cartridge. It was about as foolproof as possible. If the cartridge was removed prematurely then only one frame was truly lost. The photos were square and at that time (the 1970s) printed on stippled paper to about 3.5 inches square. 

The first photos I took have been lost in the mists of time. I remember taking a lot and my parents becoming quite agitated about the costs of film and processing. There was a kind of magic about taking a picture then months later seeing the images on paper and remembering the day.

Fast forward a few years and my mother gave me a Rollei 35LED camera. This was pure luxury. My first proper compact camera. I used that no end. Sadly though as it took mercury batteries, it is now a historical item that can't really be used. Mercury batteries went out of production many years ago.

I was hooked on photography and joined a photography club where we shot B&W film and printed the film in a little darkroom in the middle of the local YMCA. There, we used Praktika MTL3 cameras with screw-on lenses. That was great. I wanted more - ever more.

I did get my own screw mount camera but sold it quickly and bought a Pentax setup instead. That was fine until I went for a more modern camera - the Pentax Super A. That was where the problems started. The first model out of the box was broken and had to be exchanged. The exchange model also had a fault so that had to be sent off to be repaired. It still was unsatisfactory so I sold all the Pentax equipment and went for Nikon instead.

Using the new Nikon equipment I managed to earn some money for the first time with my cameras. It wasn't vast fortunes but it was enough to offset some of the purchase price. I remember saving for new lenses fastidiously. I would walk instead of catching a bus. I would skip lunch instead of eating in the college cafeteria. Each lens was purchased with sweat and suffering. Each lens had a sense of worth and pride. Those lenses kept their value too - even when the new-fangled autofocus things came in.

Roll on a few years and I was pressed to start a photography business, purely because I wanted to buy a digital SLR for myself. I'll draw a blank over the business and why a business that I never wanted in the first place was started. It didn't work out and I cannot really say that I was surprised. The only thing that surprised me was that I didn't lose more money than I did. I will say this - I did give it my best shot but could never get anybody to look at my work nor my website. There was just a total lack of interest from the public. There's just no way to make a disinterested public look up a website or look at a portfolio.

During the photography business, I'd been pressed to purchase everything that could possibly be of use. As soon as the pressure was off, I dumped the ridiculous business license. I actually waited two years too long to do that. The first year I thought that maybe just possibly if I changed the focus from family photos to commercial images - well, that didn't get any interest either. The local businesses were quite happy with lower quality images shot on their iPhones. The second year I was a little slow off the mark and only decided to dump the business license in March which meant that I hung onto it until December just in case a miracle happened.

So, the business license became history much to my great relief. I no longer had to file zero every month. I no longer had nasty letters demanding $2,500 of assessed tax if I actually forgot to file zero. Life became so much better. Slowly I began to enjoy photography again.

During the interminable 5 years of having the miserable business, I managed to write two books on photography. Those actually sell quite reasonably. When I wrote them, I considered any sale at all to be a vindication. As it is they are making quite a nice little income every year.

The equipment I amassed for the business - I've been selling that off as fast as I can find buyers. I dumped all of the studio equipment into a job lot. I think the guy got a real bargain. I was glad to be shot of it - I'd struggled to sell it for so long that I was all set to toss it in the dumpster when suddenly somebody showed interest. If only I can sell the ridiculous flashes that would be wonderful. They were something like $550 new and I'll be lucky to get $350 for them now. Most of them are still in their plastic wrap, having never been used.

I developed an interest in high-speed imaging and did reasonably well at it and even wrote a book. I'm now quite interested in images of the Milky Way. That's my next project. From the photography business I did learn one thing - I really prefer to photograph landscapes and technical subjects. I don't have the patience to photograph people.

Domain names - the countdown to abandonment

www.britphoto.us will become www.tehisp.blogspot.com in a couple of weeks. www.britinthe.us will become www.britishphotography.blogspot.com in a couple of weeks also. This change has been perpetuated by Name.Com requesting more than double the domain name fee. When the domains were purchased in 2013 they were $3.99 each which is why I bought two and why I bothered with domain names. Now Name.Com wants a ludicrous $10.99 each. As these two are purely blogs, there seems singularly little point in paying $10.99 for each blog domain name. I can get along quite satisfactorily without them. Certainly many of my old links won't work any more but who really truly cares?

As far as I am concerned, $10.99 is better in my pocket than in somebody else's. As far as I know, I have 3 domains due to expire between the beginning of July and the end of October. One is a domain I know I don't use. The other two are domains that I use but could quite happily live without. They have all risen to $10.99 so that means I now have $32.97 available for use on such frivolous things as groceries.

Are domain names really needed? These days with the speed of a Google search, I don't really believe they are. I notice that all the things that I have done to help my blogs to become popular have all backfired badly. I used domain names that were short and easy to remember so that people could access the blogs easily. Those could actually be the salvation of this blog. When I started it, I had no blog entries. Thus I wanted to make it easy to find. Now I have plenty content so online searches should be finding the content. They're not finding it that often at the moment. I suspect because there are too many links going to and fro. I'm not sure that all this linking is a good thing.

As with everything, look online and one writer swears by one technique and another by a different technique. None of the techniques tried so far have gained a single extra visitor. I've acquired a load of bots visiting but that's all. I'm going thus to call bullshit on all of the SEO techniques and popularisation techniques and just say that content is king. I have very much a feeling that Google searches have largely made domain names entirely redundant.

In a way, losing the domain names is a bonus as not only does it save me money but it also kills off all the linkbacks. I'm leaning toward the philosophy that my blogs should not be found as blogs but as individual articles. After all, when I hunt online, I look at individual articles. I don't pick a blog and read every post. I pick the articles that come up in an online search and read those articles if they interest me. To my mind, hit generation created by pasting the links to your blog are the most worthless kinds of hit creation. Instead, paste links to individual articles. That way the search universe runs the way it should.

Domain names, SEO and all that malarkey are, in my opinion very much over-hyped. My blog hit numbers dived after I dumped all the "popularisation" widgets. Income rose despite the fact each page now has fewer viewers. I notice a great number of hits from some of the camera discussion websites. Interestingly, those hits do not correspond to income. That's another darned good reason to dump the domain names. I'd rather have meaningful hits than meaningless hits. I can't make every hit a paying hit but I can eliminate the fake hits. I suspect that camera forums just generate fake hits - probably as the camera forums own search engine indexes my site as it searches its own site. I think I'd rather have people that find my blog through searches than people that just blindly follow links. That way I should get people who're more interested in what I have to say.

Play nice on the phone - honey attracts more bees than vinegar

You are the voice of the company. When you pick up the telephone, act responsibly. This was a phonecall I had today...

<caller> Hello Rachel
<me> There's nobody here called Rachel.
<caller> Oh... *click*


What was wrong with that call? More than that - what was right with that call? The whole call was horrible. This is not how anybody should act on the phone. Needless to say, I googled the number and found it was one of those miserable little recruitment agencies.

What the caller should have done is...

<caller> Hello, This is John from Acme Inc, may I speak with Rachel please.


People just don't give their name and their company name. The rule of good etiquette is that you state your identity so people know they're dealing with a human then the company so they know it's a business call then identify the purpose of the call. "Hello Fred" just doesn't cut it!


In fact, I hang up on people that don't state their name, who they're working for and the subject of the call. If I have to ask, I get very surprised responses. Maybe I need to set up a course in "telephone operation" because most people don't seem to understand it - not even half the receptionists I speak with.