Commercial Photographer Serving Dallas, Denton and Houston, Texas. #photographer #texasphotographer
Welcome back my friends – to the show that never ends!
It’s time for some major announcements for the direction and endurance of my photography and the nearly 30-year-old Shannon Drawe Photography business. You see how nicely I separated the two? It certainly has been a long show, and one of the acts is about to close, and another is about to blow wide open.
WWW.SDPHOTOGRAPHY.COM
For many years I have kept the retail functions of my photography separate from the commercial photography that I have been doing more dominantly this decade. Now, as the retail demand has been driven down to absurd levels of cost by a) the digital revolution, b) the mediocrity of retail photography and, c) the demand for “snaps,” or “pictures” continues to increase — it is time to fold up the sdphotography.com tent. By the end of this month www.sdphotography.com will be taken offline and the functions of that retail site will be relegated to the trash heap of the photographic revolution.
AS I originally SEGREGATED the images into categories for each website www.shannondrawe.com and www.sdphotography.com, the intent was to provide a “firewall” between retail and commercial work. That meant a lot of work, with a lot of heart, was separated and sent to www.sdphotography.com so as not to offend the art buyers, and corporate and commercial photography buyers. Those days have passed (as have many of those buyers) into oblivion. I no longer have to worry about the prima(o)donna attitudes that said, “Oh, we never hire retail photographers,” directly inferring they were better than that. Look all you like: I am certainly no “Retail Photographer” nowadays, and can’t imagine going backwards to that life.
BRINGING IT ALL BACK TOGETHER
Rather than simply extinguish a huge chunk of my history with the shutdown of www.sdphotography.com, I choose to take the honest route that will take my life and work to the next phase. Starting now, I am going to be adding new galleries, new posts with images, and new pages that integrate my past, deepest visual expressions – into this website.
Once that integration is complete – in January 2017 – this website will be the repository for the FINAL EDIT from my past. Sure, there’s reams more newspaper taresheets, prints, slides by the thousands, negatives from the newspaper business (including NFL and MLB games), but all that is put away now for good reason. I am not a big fan of looking BACK, and now it really is time to look FORWARD.
At the same time I am closing down www.sdphotography.com, I am more than willing to sell that site URL for the right price. So far, I have had offers that were uneducated as to the reality of the value of a URL like that, a URL I have owned since 1992. And that value is not assigned by me.
LOOKING FORWARD
It is easy for me to forget I had cancer last year, but was humbly reminded by seeing a lot of old friends, ones I haven’t seen in awhile, that I did in fact have a life altering encounter with the “C” word late last year. For better or worse, I am looking a lot more forward that back right now. The cancer experience, in itself, is a springboard into deeper knowledge I can apply to my medical photography in 2017.
And that forward look includes a return to my roots, the roots of why I am a photographer, and overlaying that old drive with new technology and skills honed in the beauty that is the digital revolution. The overlays of life leave me with a drive to do more DSLR video work, do more books, return to the streets, return to the landscapes, return to the travel, return to the abstractions and outright attempts at art.
Out of all that, I want 2017 to emerge as a time for documentary video and photography. In those areas, I will have to seek unconventional funding to devote the time and new equipment to the quality of the final document. Stay Tuned For That!
On the home front, I continue to build www.dentondigital.com into a viable website creation business that focuses on wordpress sites for those of us who just want to control (literally) the messenger and the message. The other things, the things that keep the home fires burning, will be an emphasis on recapturing the Denton, Texas, commercial photography and video market – where competition has been sorely missing for years. It’s a tiring endeavor to educate on and sell photography locally (doing both at the same time), but with the influx of new people and new businesses to Denton, Texas, maybe the new wave will be a bit more responsive to the need for a professional image up front.
I will also be teaching some new classes in 2017! I am planning three sessions that cover a lot of territory, so stay tuned for that as well. Thank you for taking the time to read, and feel free to contact me about purchasing my art, booking my services, or whatever else is on your mind!