The plan: what I am doing right now.

So I have been "serious" about photography for 11 years now.. and by serious I don't necessarily mean "good".. LOL. I of course have developed over the years from a total amateur with a Pro-sumer POS to whatever-the-heck-I-am-now. Over the course of this time I have taken probably over 100,000 pictures.. all of which are in my photo archives (don't ask how much storage that takes up.. ). It is organized but not to the level of having keywords setup (future project).

One of my big issues is that I don't really have much of my work on display. People know I am into photography but it isn't like I can show them anything that I have done.. save maybe the stuff I do for CDP which is on the web site. One time long ago I had some work up on the net but it started to suffer from neglect and I took it down.

SO..... A few weeks ago I put together a plan:

1. Go through all my work from beginning to now and select items to include into a portfolio.
2. Re-Retouch everything using my up to date tools, workflow, knowledge, and skills.
3. rebuild ChrisOnjianPhotography.com into a 1 stop shop online portfolio, info, etc site to showcase me and my work.
4. Build up galleries using one of the various existing photo sites (dphoto, zenfolio, etc etc).
5. Establish a blog for my musings.
6. Work on putting together some kind of printed portfolio.. (book, prints, etc etc whatever)

Obviously I have completed #5 on the list. I have done a 1st pass through my work and have identified around 100 shots I want to include.. these do NOT cover any of my portrait work.. that I will do later (and will not be including any client work more then likely). I am mainly going to focus on my scenic, nature, abstract, and cityscape work for now.

So now I am working on #2... and it is tedious. I am working my way from oldest to newest.. My workflow back then was a joke (seriously.. a total joke).. and the image noise in all the Olympus E-10 photos is atrocious.. Doing multiple stages of noise reduction and sharpening.. After a bit of time I have made a big dent into the list. A majority of the "old" stuff has been done leaving just a handful. Most of the new stuff on the list has already been processed to my liking, and now it is just a matter of output sharpening and reduction.

However.. I still have a ton of new material from PA to look at and some other work which I will be including.. so there may be a bunch more to do from scratch once I get to that point. I also have to go back and look at the portrait work as well.

The one thing that so far I will NOT be putting up is my earliest work done with the Olympus c2020 camera. These will require some significant attention due to the noise level and low resolution of the sensor. It is a shame since I have a group of real nice Statue of Liberty at sunset pictures, and some shots of the Blue Angels from an airshow, and I wanted to include them. I have some tentative plans to get more SOL pictures this fall/winter but who knows...

Anyway.. after all that is done I will finally be in a position where I can display my work, and have it critiqued on a different level. I am both excited and hesitant on having my work evaluated by real photographers who are not personal friends. I am curious as to seeing exactly where I am with my abilities.. I KNOW how I feel about it.. every time I think I have a photo which hits the mark I browse some galleries on Photo.net or BetterPhoto and promptly feel that my work is just not worthy. The fact is there are just soo many good photographers out there it is so hard to really stand out.. anyway that is a discussion for another time.

....so this is what I will be up to the next few weeks.. I do have some photo shoot ideas in mind for the fall but this will be limited to my available time. Also.. I *might* be taking a work trip to AZ in Sept and may have a window of time to do what I want. Tentatively I plan to dedicate every waking moment to photography and not sleeping very much either! :) But we will see if i go or not. It is 60/40 at the moment toward going.