Hey Everybody! Hope this week had found you healthy and happy. Me? Pretty good. This week I want to talk about something I certainly have been guilty of . Taking photographs for social media. Taking photographs just for social media and everything that comes with it. I used to call it feeding the gram.  Now I still like to post to Instagram but I try not to take photo's just because they will get likes. Now I know everybody likes to get likes and nice comments about their photography but if you look at these sites al of the photos' have that same look to them. Do you know why? Because we're looking at these sites so much scrolling through other peoples best shots that we start to think that that's how photography is suppose to look like and we try to copy those styles. We even think that our photography is lacking because we can't take photo's like them. We think that they are so talented photographers and we are not. But we forget that they like us are just posting their best photographs and they may have taken 500 shots to get that one good one that you are looking at. I've heard it said that you're looking at the Algorithm's Eye and not your own. Your looking at what the computer said was a good shot and not what your own artistic eye is telling you.

Try to remember back to when you started your photography journey. Why you love taking photo's. What got you started? I wasn't because you would get likes on Instagram or Facebook. If you're like me the internet was far from being invented and you started from the love of it. We took photo's of things we loved or places so we wouldn't forget them. We tried to steal a moment in time by freezing it in a photograph. At least I did. I had no dreams of becoming a famous photographer or a journalist of any sort when I started taking photo's . I wasn't even on the yearbook staff in High School even though I walked around with a 35 mm SLR. You must remember what it was that drew you to photography and try to get that feeling again. Shoot for you. If you do this you will become an artist again and not a copy cat of other peoples vision.  This is easier than said. I'm in the process of trying to do that again. I try not to look or get caught in the scrolling of instagram but I can't help it I do find myself doing it almost every day. I still post to Instagram my Social Media of choice besides Facebook which I don't post photos too often. Beside my website which this blog is on Instagram is where my photo's live. So I'm in a sticky wicket as it were. Trying not to follow the crowd and post photo's like everyone else's and post original things that I like. I think social media is a good thing but too much of a good thing can be bad and social media tends to be this especially for photographers. 

I'm hoping to start a new chapter of my photography life with taking photo's of what I like taking .  Travel fb-art and Landscape. With the MAV (Max's Adventure Van) as my home base I hope to travel to different places and document as I go. I'll be posting to Instagram and Facebook and hopefully getting more recent photo's to my website. 

Hey if you want to check out my photography go to my instagram account Max Stansell Photography there are over 2000 posts there. Here is the link

 Max Stansell Photography Instagram Link