I’ve been blogging now for over a quarter of a century. I’m not directly aware that it has brought me much work as a photographer but it has definitely led to some interesting teaching gigs and quite a bit of consultancy too. Most importantly, it has given me an outlet for what I want to say, a great deal of satisfaction and a profile within the industry far higher than I would have ever had without it.

Back in the year 2000 I didn’t know that I was blogging because I had never heard the term. The word ‘blog’ entered my consciousness during a discussion with a good friend of mine who couldn’t understand why I hadn’t monetised my monthly posting of technique and opinion pieces on my website. He pointed out that other people were doing it and asked why I wasn’t? That would have been in, or around, the beginning of 2004. There were a couple of reasons; the first was that I didn’t own the copyright to the images that I was posting and was only able to run the website with the permission of my then employers. The second was that I didn’t want commercial factors to influence what I posted and when I posted it – something that I imagined would take the fun out of it.

The website had evolved from something that I had started using members.aol.com webspace and a very basic web design application that they provided free of charge. That would have been in early 1999 and every month I was uploading between six and ten of the most interesting images that I had shot in the previous twenty-eight days. I learned quite a bit of html coding and moved to some professional web design software, my own domain and some rented web space as dg28.com was born in a very different form than it exists today.

In late April or early May 2000 I posted my very first ‘technique’ piece featuring the portrait that you see at the top of this page. I carried on doing that until 2008 uploading sixty-three ‘how I did this’ examples which have been lovingly preserved here as well as here. They feel slightly basic now but at the time an awful lot of people were following the posts and I spent a lot of evenings answering questions via email as well as on various photography forums including to the incredibly successful DPReview. It’s funny but I still get emails from photographers who learned from my examples – many of whom have gone on to exceed anything that I ever managed at the time. It feels good to have been a catalyst and an inspiration.

Posting regularly on photography forums pushed me to move past technique posts and so I started to do some regular ‘opinion’ pieces too. They ranged from my views on the business of photography via my take on composition through to choosing and using equipment and all sorts of things along the way. By the time that I decided to make major changes to the way that I published on the internet I had written twenty-five opinions – many of which have been re-published here on this version of my site in the intervening years. One or two have been allowed to assume their places in obscurity as they became hopelessly out-of-date.

I don’t post so much about technique now because others do it so much more eloquently and professionally than I have the time or inclination to do. I still can’t resist the chance to be a little bit opinionated now and then and I have kept up the monthly (or better) habit of posting here since my life changed drastically in 2008 when I went back to freelancing again.

I thought about celebrating twenty-five years by adding a list of my all-time-favourites but limiting it to a top ten or even a top twenty would be too difficult and ridiculously time-consuming. Then I considered making a list of the most read posts and as I started to get the numbers together I was a little bit depressed that number one was about swapping the wheels on a pelican case. The truth is that there are over five hundred posts and I still like the vast majority of them.

The industry has changed, techniques have changed a lot, the gear has changed even more but the basic concepts of what makes a good photograph haven’t shifted all that far. My love of what I do and communicating with anyone who will listen hasn’t changed in the slightest and I’m still an obsessive. My favourite couple of sentences that I have written anywhere on the web can be seen at the top of the “About Me” page on my main website.

Taking photographs has always been way more than a job to me. I care about the work and I care about my clients. Every time the phone rings or an email drops into my inbox with an assignment the possibilities still excite me.

The blog wasn’t the start of my career. By the time I posted my first web page I had been a working photographer for almost fourteen years and had made the full-time switch to digital over a year previously. I was twenty-two when I left college, thirty-five when I started posting and I’m sixty-one now so you can see that this has been a part of my life for a very long time.

As a photographer I started out on magazines quickly adding newspapers to my portfolio so by 1988 and the start of my third year as a professional I was shooting nearly every day and loving (almost) every moment of it. I was equally at home shooting colour transparency film as I was black and white and as newspapers gently morphed into printing in colour and shooting colour negative film I was ready for the challenge. I took a staff job in early 1994 having used a borrowed laptop and film scanner for the first time in 1992 and quickly fell in love with the whole digitisation process. By the time we got our first really usable digital cameras in 1998 I was completely ready to embrace that too.

Time has moved on and, without my noticing, I have become one of the older photographers out there and can look back and feel pretty good about paying it forward. You can never really know what kind impact you have made and, apart from seeing the visitor numbers and reading the odd comment and bit of feedback, I have no real clue whether this bit of my overall web presence does much. That doesn’t matter.

All that’s left to do is to congratulate myself, thank those who have supported the blog in all of its various incarnations and wish myself a happy silver blogging anniversary.

Footnote: A precis of my whole career history can be found here if you are actually interested or suffering from insomnia!