Greetings,

It has been an interesting week. Besides having a blast teaching Daniel from South Africa my ways at art, I had a hand full of new shoots with people I shot years ago. It is strange when I have been seeing and editing from shoots I did with these people years ago, so the images are all familiar to me. Then to have them in front of my camera again and create new images from a familiar face seems strange. In a good way, of course. That’s all great fun. And catching up on each other’s lives.

This evening I have a shoot scheduled with a lady I haven’t shot in many years, and I’m looking forward to it. Those images will be in the next Museletter, I’m sure.

A few days ago, I had a chance to sit back and ponder my goals and consider what makes me relevant in my world. What triggered it was being banned from the 500px website. That was a blow at first because my images had serious exposure on that site. Over one million views of my art each month! And I advertised my training website there, and most of the people who signed up came from my exposure on 500px. So yeah, that hurts. And as popular as my images were, and I had 3,000 of them on that site, they still bristled whenever I forgot to mark my post as NSFW. I often asked them to change their program to have the option always to use whatever the last setting was or a sticky control. You check it, and it stays checked. I was a programmer, so I know how simple that is. Maybe an hour of coding. But nope, I forgot three times over my ten years there, and boom, I’m out.

So, I sat back and considered what this meant and my view of social media in general. I have never lived for ‘likes’ or how many ‘friends’ I had in so-so media. I understand I am simply a commodity sold and traded, and to keep me from wanting to go for a hike and smell the flowers, they give me a token amount of exposure. Of course, if I toss money at them directly, they will add another token amount of exposure. It costs them nothing to hold back and charge more. It’s all about the bottom line to them. And they don’t like nipples because that taints the wider spread of information sales they are always looking for. So, we are punished for spoiling their marketing plans.

Back to pondering my virtual belly button. I will miss 500px postings but I realized I actually only got serious about it a year ago. So not a big deal really. And I know how to post pictures that ‘probably’ won’t get jail time on so-so media so I’ll still post once in a while because having your name out there is kind’a important. But, the biggest change is that I discovered how much I love creating and how little I care who sees it. My focus is now on you! The subscribers to the Museletter. Between this newsletter and my website, I have everything I need and I’ll spend more time cultivating that and enjoying my own work as an outlet instead of a show-and-tell function. Thanks for your support and riding along.

I’m going to be working on making my art available in prints officially over the next month. Anything can be bought now by just asking me, but I’d like to have a store to wander through. Picking out my best creative work is time consuming just because of the volume. And I also need to create those coffee table books I keep promising.

Meanwhile, because I’ll be posting new edits less in other places, there will be more in each Museletter. I’ll still have a featured model but it might not be the entire gallery.

Stay cool, happy, and healthy!

Dave

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