Plenty Too Blog About - Not Enough To Blog With

I am well-stocked with photographs, ideas and plans for blogging about a solid number of issues effecting various aspects of life in the Greater Dundalk Suburban Area.

I've batches of photographs waiting for final tweaks and edits required for my approval of their publication on this website. Story ideas nudge themselves into my thoughts—just about whenever I'm awake. I have a lot of writing that needs doing. Plus my email accounts are overloaded with thousands of unread emails I must clear of spam in order to locate other emails that require a response. Several serious factors are delaying that work, which I crave to get done—quite severely so.

Physical keyboards don't work with my computer, anymore, so I'm typing using the mouse pointer to click upon an on-screen keyboard. Try working that way, and see how slow and aggravating it is. Plus my computer hard drive is jam-packed with photography files, up to within a gig-or-two short of the limit.

My camera's shutter button is worn out, and requires being squeezed down upon hard—while being wiggled every which way—before a photo exposure happens. Sometimes it prevents me from getting a shot. Those negative factors are broilin'-my-gizzards. Causing extreme frustration.

In July 2010, I bought my camera and laptop new. Neither are professional quality equipment and are worn out from the intense amount of work I do using them. They're all I can afford.

Before getting them, I worked with old, used computers I scrapped together, and I hadn't owned a camera for several years. It was maddening seeing many photo ops lost, while constantly having to scrounge used parts for repairing computer gear.

Since buying the inexpensive camera and laptop, I've Internet-published hundreds of custom crafted photos along with a serious amount of written work. I do that because I can't survive just sitting home collecting my disability pension from the Veterans Administration (I was an Army photographer on Okinawa in 1970-71). But, my veterans pension rate is a low-income situation.

If I could do weddings, or other "bread and butter" type paid photography, I would. Degenerative back disease, debilitating depression, and lack of financing keep me from making profits off of my natural, well-developed, photography skills, talents and self-motivated work.

Lack of financing has left me using one inexpensive digital camera, which does not have interchangeable lens capability. The camera only automatically handles lens focusing and most of its exposure settings. In the past, I always employed full manual control of my cameras. Manual camera control permits the photographer to maintain complete creative control of photo exposures. And in all of the digital images I've produced with my year-and-ten-month old Nikon L110, I detect a lower quality than I see in digital images made from other photographers' shots taken with pro-level photographic gear.

That all hurts and angers me. Sometimes it depresses me so severely that I'm knocked aside and not able to do any work for days. But, fortunately, most days and nights I work steadily from mid-afternoon till near daybreak. There are streaks were I can't  even turn on the TV for weeks, because I'm concentrating so intensely on my work.

I live to work, and work to stay alive.

The best part is that many people from near and far enjoy the fruits of my labor. I thank you who do.

For everyone to possess a fair and balanced knowledge and opinion of my work, it is an honest statement for me to tell you that there's not enough of it getting done, and it's not near enough to being top professional grade photography for it to completely satisfy me.

I'm deeply satisfied with and thankful for what I have produced, but I'm painfully aware of how much more, and how much finer, work I'm capable of—and craving to do.