Visitor with Flowers

I do need to trust my own images to convey what I felt at the time. When I put the site up, I thought that I should carve out the New York black and white niche. How else could I make a spot for myself on the web? But after many years of concentrating on New York, I began to tire of it, and switch to different media. First was infrared film. No one would want these, but I’ll do them anyway. They turned out to sell briskly. And then I switched to digital infrared. These also sold well. And then I fooled around with HDR, and these also sold. When I say, sold well, what I mean is that they had the same or maybe slightly better rate of sale then what I had been doing.

So now I find myself expanding to Paris. And I have tons of work from my Ansel days in the Southwest. I begin to have more trust in myself – and that my niche may always be mainly New York – but not to limit myself anymore to this, and to have some trust that good images will sell, no matter where they were taken. (Not this one – because pictures of cemeteries rarely sell for obvious reasons – but I think the idea of expanding the site is a good one).

Besides gaining confidence in my own work – I’m also at a point where images that were very difficult to print in the darkroom – can be brought back to life fairly easily in the digital post-processing age.

If you read the blog regularly – you’ll remember lots of complaining on my part about sales being slow, or if sales are brisk, not having time to shoot.  But lately, sales are coming in regularly – many are from the art buyers, and these might be for twenty or thirty at a time.  And I’m having a much easier time getting them out.  I think what changed was switching to the mac.  Yes – the money I put into buying a high-powered mac, has simply cut the amount of time I’ve spent doing the processing and printing dramatically.  Thank you everyone that convinced me to make the move.  I haven’t dipped into the PC parallel Windows version that’s installed for any reason since getting the mac.  The only times I’ve had to reboot were when new OS software was installed.  And I remember how scared I used to be everytime I had to do this with the PC.  Would it boot again?  What was going to go wrong this time.

I simply haven’t had any glitches with the Operating System and have been able to spend my time working on the prints.  Quite a revelation.