Another good nephew portrait

My main photographic subject the last 1.5 years.

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I take it all back: Instagram is crap

It only took a few days from me announcing it here to being locked out of my Instagram account.

Every time I log in I get the page that says nothing except “Oops, an error occurred.”  And you can’t go to anything on Instagram after that, it gives you the same page.  I’ve tried resetting my password, my replacement 8 character password will have a bunch of things added onto it every time I try and nothing changes.  There’s no explanation, no way that I can see to remedy it.  Using alternate browsers makes no difference.  Deleting all my cookies makes no difference.  They don’t have a support email account, evidently they do it all through the app, but of course I can’t use the app.  I even started a new account to ask for help but they haven’t replied.  What a piece of shit.  I should have known better than to meddle with phone apps.  At least WordPress is still here for me.

2021 late season cowboys

…and cowgirl.

Tumbleweed, Dakota, Ringo, and Clementine.

Why not start an Instagram?

Well I mean I found reasons not to do it for a long time.  But going back to my Advanced Photo class that was one thing that my instructor Stacy suggested that we all do was to keep our professional Instagram account separate from our personal one.  Well I never had a smart phone and never had Instagram…back in those days I’m not sure I could even do anything from a computer, it all had to be on the phone.  I really don’t stay connected online very well and have a very ambivalent attitude towards most social media; I’ve had Facebook since about 2005 and that’s been it, and even that has really worried me in the last half decade or so.  I don’t even know what else is out there…Flickr?  That’s all I know.

But with so many people on Instagram and it being primarily for photo sharing, I think I had it in the back of my mind enough to start an account back in 2017 or so but just sat on it since then, nothing I could do with it until recently (I’d read about workarounds but never went through the trouble of trying one).  I decided that this year’s resolution would be to get my professional account set up so I could continue the Cowboys & Jeeps project there.  And then I discovered that Instagram announced back in the Summer 2021 that people were going to be able to upload photos from their computers, making it that much easier a decision for me.

So here it is, my own Instagram dedicated to this 4-year-long (and counting) photo project, named after my AOW cowboy handle.  Instagram: Thefamouspdog  It’s been running since 4 January, 2022.  That only puts it 8 years behind this WordPress site.  But the format I have decided to take is to post one photo a day and keep that up until I run out of pictures.  If you happen to be heading that way, please check it out, and if you have any helpful suggestions that will improve my new site, and help me get noticed/recognized, please contact me.  I’m new to this.

So why did I take that step?  Because Stacy our instructor told the class that having a dedicated professional Instagram account to share only your best work was very helpful in getting noticed in the art world.  Evidently there are a lot of curators, exhibitors, et. al. who will search for up & coming artists on Instagram.  There’s a story she told us about this this one website editor (or was it magazine?) who was following a guy who only posted pictures of meat (he evidently worked in the industry).  And after about two years, there was an article being written about meat processing plants and needed pictures and this woman thought of the meat guy and reached out to him, he ended up getting a paying photo gig because of it.  So who knows, it could be the start of something.

I’m hoping that I can start up a professional portrait photography business piggybacking off this, because I think if I’m going to be getting paid for work, why not something for which I spend a lot of time doing anyway?  Next up…revamping my professional website to be more balanced between photography and music.

Widowmaker

Back in December we had a big weather front and high winds whipping through Colorado and this tree in my mom’s backyard fell over.

Because of the way it splintered and still harboring quite a lot of potential energy this is known as a widowmaker, though thankfully my friends and I were able to cut it down without too much trouble (and no fatalities).  No pictures of that, as I was too busy working.

A photographic time capsule

This was the single-use camera that someone found and gave to me.  I used up the last few exposures and then I just never got around to developing the film.  It turned out to be from 2017, I know because in the first image on the left is a cowboy named Twister who has since gone on to bigger and better things.  It was also nice to see a pic of myself in action, this is a shot I’ve gotten of a couple drivers in the past.

I’d say that this roll of film aged a bit better than the last one I found, but it is quite a lot newer.  I wouldn’t call these stunning images at all but it was a nice surprise to see what was on this roll of film because at this point I didn’t even remember taking these.