For a while I had taken a break from photography. There were two basic reasons for this – first of all, it had become very cold and that disuaded me from taking my camera around. I was afraid of breaking it with the temperature difference between the outside air and the buildings. I was afraid of falling and breaking the camera or hurting myself trying to protect it. But, most importantly, with all my jackets and sweaters it was a bit of a hassle to carry my camera in its protective case. Second, I really like editing my pictures and making them a little closer to perfect. This was very time consuming and I didn’t have the time for it.

But recent events have brought me back into photography. First of all, as the days go by I become more and more aware of the fact that I am soon going to graduate and will not return to Cornell for a long time. I have, therefore, began to document my surroundings. Speaking of documenting, the documentary style of photography is appealing to me more and more when I read about it and see the types of pictures taken. Second, about a month ago I began posting my pictures on www.flickr.com (this link goes to my particular photos) after reading about it in a Linux article which mentioned the that Flickr ran completely on open source software.

After taking a look around, I realized that Flikr was the best way for me to get my pictures out to a new audience. Yeah, some people do find their way to my website somehow, but I really want to reach people with my photography. Flickr is a great place to do that because of the way photos are linked up. People can search for pictures based on key words, favorite photographers, favorite interests, and other many search methods. It is a proper community with quite a few talented people involved. Another way it gets people to view photos is by having people leave comments. The comments are usually positive or constructive and, along with the comment, a link to the section of the person commented is left. This is how I end up seeing other people’s artwork. Then when I make comments on their art, others go to mine and so on and so forth. This has spurred me to take more pictures to put up including artistic, fabricated pictures and old fashioned pictures that have interesting subjects. The only bad thing about Flickr is that the free accounts have a 10 megabyte upload limit per month. I can’t ever wait until the end of the month to be able to post more pictures. It’s also quite addictive checking back every day or so to see what kinds of comments others have left on your site or which pictures have been marked as someone’s favorite.