Ok. I got an I-Phone (I never know- do you hyphenate that? And what part is capitalized? The I AND the P in 'phone'?) finally, after a long period of hemming and hawing. I'm not so keen on playing games or using the plethora of apps out there but I have been heavy at use with the camera. 
   All good websites have to have pictures, right? So here I am, combing the local area for anything photo worthy. 'Photo worthy' is up to the beholder and I am eclectic when it comes to judging what I think the public wants, which is what I want- quirky, weird stuff. 
     So what have I taken pictures of, in months of photo shopping? Bumper stickers. Stuff people stick on the windows of their cars, on light poles, on guardrails, whatever object a sticker can be stuck to. 
   Sunsets. Lots and lots of sunsets. And signs. Dozens of those.
   Weird clouds. Beach scenes. And who knows what else. I have a whole photo library by now and I have used some of my stuff in my posts but not a lot. 
    There won't be many dog and cat pictures, or baby pictures, I'm not gonna torture you with that, but when I start dipping into my photo library I will be steady on the quirky stuff. But----- there's not a lot of that out there! Not as much as you'd think. 
   I scan parking lots for unusual bumper stickers, and have my eye out in the city for strange stuff where'er I go, countryside too, and in doing this I remembered from my film days that photography is a game of patience. You have your camera always at the ready and you pounce on what shows. 
   The best photographers are always on the lookout for and will readily take the big picture- those magic moments happen sometimes- but more often than not it's the little stuff within the scene that is photoworthy. You take pictures and then crop them in order to get to the thing that caught your eye, and this I do. I take shot after shot after shot (no limit with digital) and crop them. 

     I-Phones aren't exotic Canon professional cameras but they are amazing in what they can do. I can zoom in and out on a subject. I can take pictures in time lapse mode, or in slow motion, and run them back like a movie. I can take panoramic shots. I can take videos. Often I tweak my photos in 'edit mode', and if I ever was driven enough, I suppose I could take one or two to the Photoshop and really go to work on them. 
   I do this because photos are property. You can't just grab anything off the internet and reproduce it, you have to have permission to do that or you have to pay. I prefer not to pay, I make up my own stuff or use free content sites. If I use the stuff off of free content sites I give the original photographers credit for taking the picture. It's a win/win. They want exposure, and in exchange I get guys and gals scanning the world for me, canvassing the globe for me! Is that not AWESOME?!
   It is, but there is a problem with that, the problem being that what they shoot is pretty vanilla. I like a lot of their stuff but sometimes I want edgier subject matter, shots that are dark and quirky, and they give me young, fresh, clean, and and hipster. Oh well! You've got to work with what you have available. 
    Somehow I get by. 
   In the future I hope to include some time lapse and slow mo stuff in my blog posts, you know, insert more cool techie stuff, but it's a learning curve and I'm not so highly motivated at present. My plate is very full in just doing the day to day. 
     The thing with artists is, they gotta have time to produce and if they don't have time (or are uninspired) production is low so you get what you get.
     Whole artist's CAREERS can be summed up in that sentence. I hope and pray that that doesn't apply to me because I'd like to put out more stuff but fortunately for you, there are millions of artists out there producing.

     Individually, an artist's portfolio might not seem like much. "It took him/her a lifetime to produce that?! But collectively, artist's can put out a lot and in that way we fill the internet and magazines and museums. Art outlives many of the artists that make it. With the unlimited data storage at our command these days these very words I'm typing might last forever. 

    Something to think about!  

   (Or not).