I do(n't) care.

I spent a good portion of yesterday wondering what I should write for my next post. Should I try to keep up with all of the countless announcements/rumors coming out of CES this week and PMA at the end of the month? Should I offer my two cents on the long-contested Nikon v Canon debate? Should I offer some killer Photoshop tutorial that, truth be told, you could find any number of other places? And all while I was doing this, I was trying to finish a CD of images I took for some friends of mine at their wedding, wait on customers, keep our photo lab here at work from getting further behind, and educate a new coworker on some of the more confusing aspects of photography. And somewhere in the middle of all of that was when I realized...

I don't care.

Let me clarify: I do care deeply about photography. It's the one thing I am most passionate about; the one thing I can't learn enough about; the one thing I can see myself doing vocationally or avocationally for the rest of my life. But somewhere along the line (be it a result of having to keep up to speed on this spec and that figure to then turn around and sell goods and services to the public, or me just being a little bit of a closet gearhead myself), I started to lose sight of what it's really all about, which is taking photographs.

Yes, having better gear can help you achieve results that you can't get otherwise. Yes, knowing what Acme Camera Co. offers on their models compared to those made by Blam-O Imaging can help you make informed purchasing decisions. And yes, knowing how to further enhance your images using the available software is the other half of any photographer's workflow...

See, I just said the word "workflow." That's not a word I like to use. It has nothing to do with photography per se, but everything to do with how we approach things in the digital age. Those of us shooting digital (and I know of some holdouts out there that aren't) are often coming home with a memory card full of hundreds of images, which requires sifting through them to find the ones worth keeping, and then sifting through those to find the ones worth editing, only to have to decide which of THOSE are worth ever sharing with anyone else. Workflow. Fun, right?

The point is that I never intended this blog to be another photo technology blog – there are plenty of them out there that do a much better job of keeping all the facts and figures straight. I wanted this to be a photography blog, discussing the art, the passion, the education, the struggles, the mistakes, and yes occasionally the tips, techniques and technology that allow us to make the art, feed the passion, make and then correct the mistakes. I was so excited trying to explain to my aforementioned coworker how some of these things work, and even when I was presented with a question I couldn't directly answer, I had fun trying to figure out the answer, and explain it in such a way that it would make sense, not to someone already familiar with the terminology, but to the average person off the street that wants to know more.

So anyway, with that new mission statement....

(See, there I go again, using annoying terminology.)

So anyway, with that new manifesto (I like that!) out of the way, I hope Photowonk can be a source for all of those things and more. With the possible exception of Henri Cartier-Bresson, there's not a single famous photographer I can name whose equipment I can also name, becasue it doesn't matter. The equipment is simply the tool through which the mind and the heart find expression. If that tool is a Leica rangefinder, a Canon EOS 30D (raises hand), a Nikon 35mm point-and-shoot, or a pinhole camera made from an oatmeal box, what matters is how you express yourself with that tool. The tools help, and you can't do certain things with the wrong tools (although frankly, just about anything can be used as a hammer when you think about it), but it's what you build with those tools that counts.