An Important Lesson About Photography

Each month, the photography club I'm a member of, the Las Vegas Photographic Society, has a photo contest. They call it a challenge, but it's a contest.

I try to enter each month, and won early on, but in recent months haven't had much luck. I grew frustrated, because my photos were clearly "better" than the others (objectively speaking, of course), but the voting by club members just didn't go my way. I'd spend hours on coming up with concepts, and hours more making the photos happen, including even more hours doing extensive editing of the images in Photoshop to ensure their perfection.

Last month, the theme of the contest was "expressions." That was it. Having grown weary of spending lots of time submitting losing entries, I looked for a candid shot that would even remotely fall under the category of "expressions." I submitted this shot on a whim, despite it not being a great photo, technically.



Stuff on his face. My niece's arm in the background. My nephew's hand cut off.

But here's the lesson. The photo won the contest. Not just the club vote, but also the vote of some objective, third-party folks who said it was the photo they'd be most likely to shell out money for.

In the end, it's necessarily about technical perfection. It's about evoking an emotion. It's tough to know what people are going to connect with, but most often, ordinary humans aren't going to care about the little details photographers obsess over. They want an emotional connection. Who knew?

It's Time to Sip From the Dribble Glass (Again)

Man, alive, it's been awhile since I've blogged here. The reason for that is fairly obvious. I now blog for a living for Caesars Entertainment. I've thrown myself into the Pulse of Vegas blog, and am probably putting in about 60 hours a week on it. And those long hours seem like almost nothing because I truly love what I'm doing. Day in and day out, for the last two years. It's been a blast, and continues to be.

I had no idea I wanted to blog for a living. Especially not a corporate blog. But come to find out, it's an ideal occupation for me because it almost never feels like a job. I love Vegas, and can't really imagine being so passionate about blogging were it not for my subject matter.

Note: I know I haven't been making time for personal blogging because I don't even think I mentioned I won a "Most Valuable Las Vegas Blogger" award from CBS Local and KXNT News Radio. Most valuable. In Las Vegas. All of it.



My personal blog has always been an as-time-allows kind of thing, and time hasn't allowed for much lately. I've fallen for a young woman who's turned my world upside down. (Much more about her soon, I suspect.) She's also a handful, and that can be a full-time job in and of itself.

I'm thinking, though, I should make more time for my personal blog. I'm learning so much about the power of blogging, and I have a lot more to say, so I should probably say it here.

I fear my loyal readers have all drifted off. I get that. Same with the visitors to my site, Dribbleglass.com. That's OK. I haven't updated it in ages. We just kind of grew apart.

These days, I live on Twitter and Facebook, for the most part. And occasionally I post on Flickr.



Yep, that's Maria. I didn't say it would be too much later before you heard more about her.

So, today, I'm changing the name of my blog to "Sips From the Dribble Glass of Life." Because it's a metaphor that's always kind of summed up my core belief about life and the world. It all feels like a bit of a cosmic joke, and it's really important that we all make the most of it, while keeping a sense of humor about, well, everything.

Thanks for reading this far, and I intend to keep the words flowing, even if only to highlight some of my work on the Pulse of Vegas blog. Or to share photos of Maria. She's kind of into that.