My First Blog Entry!

Welcome to those of you who are new here and to those of you who have followed me at my old wordpress site.

A brief introduction for folks who don’t know me is in order.

I’m Greg. I’m a professional writer during business hours and a landscape photographer when I’m not doing that.

I grew up in New Jersey and have lived up and down the Eastern seaboard. I also spent a decade in Louisiana before eventually returning to the garden state.

I’ve been snapping and sharing photos for the past 15 years or thereabouts. Places I’ve gone to photograph outside of my home base include the Smoky Mountains, upstate New York, Utah, and Maine.

On the international front, I spent about two weeks in Belize in 2022. I’ll be going abroad again in March of this year, so stay tuned for blog posts on that trip!

To get a better sense of who I am and why I do what I do, please check out the About Me page.

I’ve worked hard over the last month to get this website to a place where I felt like I could publish it.

While the site is “finished” in that sense, I will also be adding a great deal to it on an ongoing basis.

That will include a store where you can purchase my work!

Please feel free to inquire about prints before the store is up and running. I’ll be sharing a limited run I put together in an upcoming blog post with that in mind.

My custom when I write up a blog post has been to share a composition and discuss a relevant topic.

I don’t always reflect on the photographic process in my entries, though more often than not I do.

Sometimes I’ll get quite technical.

Others I’ll delve into a connecting subject, whether that’s a piece of literature the image reminds me of, a connection with a friend, the loss of a pet, what’s going on in the world, and so on.

Even when I’m talking about challenges I faced when putting together the final image that you get to see on your screen, I write in my natural voice.

Well, at least how I naturally sound on paper after spending a lifetime perfecting my unique voice.

On to the first photo itself!

As you can see, it’s not a single photo but a collage.

I initially intended to use it as the gallery banner image for this site.

A good deal of elbow grease went into making it, I can tell you.

I wasn’t sure how I was going to get to the look I wanted in the current iteration of Photoshop and watched a ton of professional videos on how to put photos in shapes.

Those methods, while cool, weren’t really working for me.

What I ended up doing was make some frames and distort them into the resulting shapes. Then add images I had chosen and position them artfully within said frames.

I had some professional experience doing that sort of thing, though this was years ago, and it took me longer than I care to admit to remember how to do it!

After all that, I asked a good friend if they prefer the collage or a single image.

You can see for yourselves which one won out on my home page!

I’ll end this very first blog post with the expected but nonetheless very sincere kind of closing thought.

I am very excited to be launching this website and for you to be going on this photographic journey with me!