I get some very funny emails from friends on a pretty regular basis, this one from yesterday really hit home.  The image is from 1956.   Give up on what it is?

It’s a hard disk drive with 5MB of storage and it weighed over a ton!  Now think about the 32 GB of storage in your iPhone!  Kind of leaves you wondering what we’ll be laughing about in another 20 years!

Stay with me a paragraph or two more – I really am going somewhere with this.

Well, just like that old van showing up 35 years later, for everybody who has been a photographer for at least five years or more, what if you were to take an hour and go back and look at the very first images you ever captured.  Let’s qualify those images a little more.  They have to be images that created income for you.  In otherwords, you thought you were good enough to get paid and proud of it.

How much fun is it to see how much your style has changed and how much better you now understand the process?  What’s changed in your sense of timing, composition and exposure?  It’s a pretty safe bet that most of you in just a few years will see changes in your skill set that compare to the range of ties I still can’t bring myself to throw out.  I’ve got Jerry Garcia ties wide enough to make into vests.

I recently found a disk of images from my first professional digital camera, which I still have.  It was a 3 megapixel gift from a good friend, then a senior manager at Eastman Kodak.  The images are from a family vacation and while they bring back memories, the quality compares with looking at faded Kodachromes of my Dad’s from the 50’s!

So, if you’re looking for an educational experience that’s both fun and will give you some insight into how much you’ve grown, go back and look at your early images.   Think about how styles and technology constantly change.  Better yet, day dream for a second and tell me what your images are going to look like five or ten years from now!

I don’t know what to call it, but we need a verb that means to check your spam filter before taking any further action.   Registration is pretty active right now for Skip’s Summer School and for some reason at least a half dozen people have contacted me to verify their registration went through.  All of them have been in the system – so where did the auto-confirmation go?  Every time it’s been in their spam filter.

A few weeks ago I responded to an email from a friend.  All I did was hit reply and my buddy’s corporate email system threw me out and even his “postmaster” had the nerve to tell me about it!  Why?  I’ve never even met the guy, something in my subject line, my name, my routing would not allow me into his exclusive email club.

Next is the cell phone.  We take it for granted when we lose a call.  We don’t even hesitate to call back.  We just accept we’ve lost the connection.  Personally I’d like to just call it “Verizoned” which would mean I lost the call and my support team of the guy with glasses and his band of 200 followers never made it to Akron.  Knowing that Verizon would be less than happy – here’s another new verb we need.  Definition?  When you get cut off and know you need to call back.

Also on the list is a word for talking to dead air when you are cut off and don’t know it.  How many times have you been cut off and continued the call?  And then, when you do realize you were talking to dead air and you call back you ask, “What was the last thing you heard me say?”  I want a word for that knot you get in your stomach when the person answers, “Hello” as the last thing they heard and you realize the last fifteen minutes have to be completely repeated!  It’s like being trapped in the movie Ground Hog Day!

I do know and respect at least one contemporary rule of engagement.  The person who made the call, when the signal is lost, is the one who calls back.  Again, don’t know what to call the originator of the call, but at least we all seem to respect and understand the rule.

And one last one we need to work on…

It’s a facebook and email challenge:   What do we call morons like me who hit reply with a sarcastic comment back to the sender, meant only for the sender, not realizing it was a group email and twenty seven people just found out how you really feel?  Or, somebody blind copies you on an email and you hit reply all, not realizing nobody was supposed to know you saw the email in the first place?

Years ago I brought my Dad to a PPA convention and we had adjoining rooms.  As he was checking out he was laughing.  “Hey Dad, what’s the scoop?”   With tears of laughter in his eyes he responded, “You know the first night I thought it was so great that the Hyatt puts a little night light on your phone so you can see it in the dark.  The second night it really bothered me and I put a pillow over it.  This morning I put my glasses on and saw that it was a message light.  Your mother called me two days ago because she couldn’t get the garage to open.  I sure hope she got out!”

As the guy who never learned how to program a VCR and has challenges today with his DVR,  I guess it’s true what they say, “The apple doesn’t fall from the tree!”

The Internet changed the way we share images, shop and communicate.  Digital photography changed the way we create and capture.  Social Media changed the way we connect and with who we connect.  Do I miss my life from ten years ago – NOT A CHANCE!

First, I love staying connected to an industry I truly appreciate.   Think about the people you “talk” to every day.  It used to be a year between friends connecting, often only at an annual trade show.   Now I’m connected to those once-a-year friends every day.

Second, the world is getting to be a tiny place.  I “talked” to Jerry Ghionis from Australia the other day who’s in Rome doing a wedding with Ryan Schembri.  And I’m connected to Yervant and Anie on a regular basis. I’ve never met Chris Fawkes and yet we regularly communicate, again on Facebook.    I can also keep track of where everybody is…Seshu, who I’ve also never formally met, a contributor to Charity Fest last fall, is on his way back to CT from India, Joe Buissink was in Russia and Charity Goh, a student I met at Hallmark Institute last year is trying to land a job in her home country of Singapore.  It’s all thanks to Twitter and Facebook.

Third, trends that used to take months to create, are out there in seconds in front of hundreds of thousands of people.  And if a manufacturer produces an inferior product, the word is out on a dozen forums in a flash.  Best of all, when you need help with a challenge, especially in photography, just post it on a forum like DWF and watch the number of people, many of whom you’ve never met, come to your aid!

Fourth, how about the way digital technology is changing our lives?  Jason Groupp, Charles and Jennifer Maring, Joseph Victor Stefanchik and Katherine Hall are leading the charge in Fusion Technology, while Jose Villa is shooting exclusively film and creating work that’s spectacular.  Bambi Cantrell and Dawn Shields worked a bridal fair recently and Bambi sent me an image on her i-phone that was good enough to post on the blog!   We’ve got the very best of all worlds at our fingertips.

The world shrinks a little with every step you take further into Social Media, but best of all is the power you have as a photographer to market yourself.    If you do it right and build your website and blog with a great attitude and the dedication to stay involved, you’ve got the power to communicate that just a few years ago only a national magazine might have had!  Scott Bourne’s PhotoFocus site has over a million page views every month, more than most publications!

So, every now and then I’ll complain that my day starts out with a couple of hours of blogging and I’m answering emails before the sun comes up.   But, would I go back to a nine to five job and not knowing what was going on until I literally opened my mail?  Would I trade in my computer for the silver letter opener my Dad had on his desk?  Would I trade in the excitement of “chimping” now and then for the pride of getting 38 exposures out of a 36 exposure roll?

The answer to all of the questions and the dozens we could all add to the list – NEVER!   In the history of photography, there’s never been a more exciting time and never more tools at our disposal to capture, create and share images.   If you’re not actively involved in staying on top of technology, as well as social media, you need to take another look.  I found the following quotes that seem so appropriate:

 ”Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.”
Stewart Brand

“The number one benefit of information technology is that it empowers people to do what they want to do. It lets people be creative. It lets people be productive. It lets people learn things they didn’t think they could learn before, and so in a sense it is all about potential.”
Steve Ballmer