Tony Urban Photography – Senior Photo Art, Pittsburgh Wedding Photographer – Somerset, Johnstown, Greensburg

I always try to find ways to stay busy during the winter.  Sometimes I’m more successful than others.

This winter I want to start writing/get back to work on two different book projects.  They’re wildly different in tone and content, but both are important to me for different reasons.

The first book is going to be about my grandmother.  She is dying from Alzheimer’s disease.  She’s been dying from the disease since 2000 and is now in the end stages.  The past month has been especially challenging as she has been in the hospital twice with aspiration pneumonia caused by her problems with swallowing.  She pulled through both times, but it was touch and go for a while.  From what I’ve read, this is something that frequently happens to Alzheimer’s patients when they’ve entered the final stage.  I hope to write the book over the winter and to share her story.  She wasn’t famous.  She wasn’t even extraordinary in any notable way.  But she was a great woman and a great mother and grandmother and I think telling the story of her life and illness is something owed to her.

The other book will be more photography-centered.  As any long time reader of my blog knows, I do a lot of traveling and I visit a lot of out of the ordinary places.  And, of course, I take photos of them.  I want to put together a travelogue of sorts for fellow fans of the weird and macabre and at the same time, share my stories of encounters with actors, writers, etc.  It’s going to be a very lighthearted tome, written in memoir style and should be a lot of fun.  This will be a longer process, probably lasting for another year, but I figure there’s no better time to start than now.  After all, the world is going to end in 2012. 

What are you going to do to stay busy this winter?

Competition in a creative field such as photography is bound to happen. In just the past year, I’ve noticed at least half a dozen new photographers trying to make a go if it in the Somerset area. I don’t mind competition at all, but I absolutely hate to see a fellow photographer acting like a complete and utter tool in an attempt to get himself business.

Facebook is a great marketing tool. Any photographer will tell you that. Finding “friends” on Facebook is easy enough, especially considering that everyone from Barak Obama to Santa Claus is on there. But that doesn’t make it okay for one of these new photographers to go on my friends list and start “adding” every single person who is my friend. I suspected this was happening for quite some time as I always noticed that my new friends were suddenly this other photographer’s friend just a few short days later. But I got all the proof I needed when I noticed that this photographer isn’t just adding people in Western PA, he’s adding everyone he sees that I’m friends with.

One example is a former classmate of mine who hasn’t lived in Somerset in 14 years. Another example is a former coworker who lives half a country away and has no ties to anything PA related except me. And the best example is that this other photographer “added” a friend of mine who is from and lives in the United Kingdom and who has never even stepped foot in Pennsylvania, let alone Somerset County.

In the past year, I’ve had photographers copy poses I’ve posted, locations I frequently use and marketing tools(I was the only photographer in Somerset/Johnstown to post animoto slideshows for seniors on my blog in 2008, now everyone is doing it – so I stopped). I’m used to things like that and to be honest, those are just the issues you have to deal with when you share your work with the world. But raiding my friends list is very, very different.

I understand that a new photographer might feel the need to resort to whatever means is necessary in an attempt to secure business, but I really feel like this is crossing a major line and I can’t believe someone who claims to be a “professional” photographer would show such a complete lack of ethics. I hope he treats his clients better than his colleagues.