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.

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