Way back on July 1st, 2009 I started up a blog on blogspot/blogger. That was about a year after I just started getting the hang of shooting with an SLR. I got into photography in 2007 after getting the Civic and joining 8thcivic.com. At the time, SLR’s were super new to the game and everybody was jumping on board. There was the thought that if you shot with an SLR, your pictures would be sick. I’ll admit that I was one of those guys that thought that was true.
I’m the type of guy that likes to know exactly what I’m getting into before doing something. I hate wasting my time. So I spent months reading up on photography, learning about aperture, shutter speed, ISO, all the good things about how a camera worked before getting it. A year later, my parents had got me a Canon XT for my birthday and boy, was I disappointed after shooting with it. My pictures looked nothing like how I imagined they would. I knew little about RAW files, how to process them and all the good stuff. Within a month, I got the hang of it and shot everything. You always know a person is new to photography when all they shoot are objects and nature because they get the hang of the rule of thirds and love the bokeh effect that they get. That was me.
A few months down the road, you get tired of shooting things like that and you have to find something you love to shoot. I wanted to start shooting what got me into photography – cars. I slowly expanded my lens collection – two of which are still with me today – 50mm F1.8 and Sigma 10-20mm. I began shooting my own car, trying to get the same effect that I would see from the pro photogs on the site and on FlickR. Light painting, night shots with a bucket because I couldn’t afford a proper tripod and that was it.
Anyways back to July 7th, 2009. I felt that I had a good grasp on photography and the only direction I could go was up. I started the blog jayhoang.blogspot.com – and it became my go-to spot to post everything I took pictures of. Over the months, people started becoming regulars, I would slowly start to get comments from anonymous people and I began making connections with people I never imagined I would ever talk to. Blogging was nothing new, but things like Tumblr wasn’t around where people just repost shit. There were a handful of good blogs out there that I loved to follow (and still follow) like Jay over at JDMEGO. I blogged because I loved to take pictures for people to appreciate too.
May 19th, 2010 – I stopped posting on the blog. Other things came up – like the start of illmotion. I couldn’t find time to balance between school, posting on and organizing illmotion, and having stuff on my blog too. Anyways, I drop by my old blog once in a while and I’m surprised it’s still getting hits. It’s nice that it’s still up even after I asked that it be deactivated. All the pictures are there and even though it was only a few years ago, it’s nice to look back. My main reason for making this post is because in the year that I had that blog – I got about 13,000 hits. I’ve only had this wordpress blog for 7 months and I’m close to 10,000. Not a huge feat – but it’s funny to see that there’s so much that’s changed that directs traffic here. Thanks to everyone that comes and reads my stuff and enjoys the posts!
If any of you are interested in it – here’s my old link. Just keep clicking “older posts”. I removed most of the formatting for some reason.
Just scrolled through and I posted some dumb and random shit LOL.
lifewithjson 