Did you know that May is also National Photography Month?

It was established in 1987 by Congress, and over the years has evolved as the art of photography has also evolved from physical photographs to digital photographs and videos. I’ve always enjoyed photography–most vacations I’d have a camera on me and go for walks to see what type of nature photographs I could capture.

As you can tell–I enjoy capturing pictures of the natural world. I remember back in college, I took a forestry class that had an international component to it (spending spring break in Honduras), and I was eager to take the class, as it would have been the first time I raveled outside of the US. I think I took almost 1000 physical photographs on that 10-day trip. Basically all the photographs were nature based, a small number had people in them, and I was present in even a smaller number of pictures. While I have done some ‘selfies’ on trips–those were more for remembrance purposes than sharing on social media. I have all those photographs, plus others from other trips in photo albums sitting in my storage unit, and they’re also digital–but on an older laptop. So once I move–I need to find and charge the older laptop and try to get the pictures off of it, or buy a scanner/printer and start scanning pictures again.

Photography has been one of the things helping me keep my sanity somewhat intact through this damn pandemic. While I didn’t go up to Boomer Lake that often last year (in part due to the shelter at home directive and in part due to not that many people wearing masks outdoors), I did manage to hone my talent with backyard birding.
I would almost consider nature and pet photography to be my ‘bread-and-butter’–those are two topics that I enjoy capturing on digital film. I’m going to be trying to ‘spread’ my photography ‘wings’ and start doing some food and architecture photography as well in the coming months (though I do have a decent number of architecture photographs from my time out on the east coast).

So how am I going to celebrate the month of photography? I’m going to try to post at least two or three pictures a week for both the ‘yearly’ challenge and to celebrate National Photography Month. I’m also going to look into the history of photography as well and read up on that subject–and possibly post book reviews or other such things here as well. But to totally celebrate–I’m going to try to be active with my camera (whether it is the digital canon or olympus cameras or the camera on the iPhone) and take a daily picture.