Sooooooooo… 300 posts. Congratulations to me, I guess. I started this little photo project in December, 2010, as a way to take a break from my other, much more wordy sites — I had / have two websites where I was writing 1500-word essays weekly about various stuff, and each post took hours to complete with all the writing and editing and thinking and research and late nights and early mornings… the most fun part of each piece was selecting the photo for the post.
So my epiphany was actually pretty obvious — why not start a site where I could simply post photos and keep the text below 300 words..? Just keep it easy and soothing for my brain. And what better subject than the little village I was living in? Before I moved back to Vankleek Hill in 2004, I had been taking photos of punk bands and concerts in Toronto, by 2005 it was gardens, weather, and sunsets and sunrises. In 2010, with this site, I started taking photos of my community. It was definitely a change…
“Several years ago I spent most of my nights taking photos of and for punk bands in Toronto. Now it’s flowers during the day. There are similarities between the subjects, like both will pay you about the same amount and, soon after forming, they’ll both break apart, wither and die. The biggest difference between the two is the amount of alcohol and ephedrine it takes to kill them.” [here]
After a few years of garden shots, family and self-portraits, as well as random weird stuff I found [here], I began to use this site as a way to connect with the local community — as a result of my submitting this photo (R), our local paper, The Review [here], started calling asking if I could cover Events for them. Then I used my photo site to start a Photo Club in town, which was pretty successful for a few years. Now I’m also using it to promote local bands and getting back into shooting punks and their bands, and I’m having a lot of fun doing it, I’m also still taking a tonne of photo’s at Events all over the place… which is most definitely cool.
…so, over 15-years, I’ve published 300 posts, that’s 4,610 photos of Vankleek Hill and Hawkesbury, I’ve received 1,000 ‘Likes’ and 369 comments, and the top five countries to have viewed my little site are Canada, the US, China (please stop raping Tibet), the UK, and Brazil. WordPress used to keep track of what terms people were using to find your site, but then they stopped… so, the most used search terms used to find my little photo site are: blurp [here], hot dentist [here] and glorb [here].
…anyway, to see some of my favourite photos from the past 15-years and 300 posts of taking photos of Vankleek Hill, just click on the first picture to get the carousel going — remember, comments are definitely welcome and, at this point, pretty much mandatory, so why not just submit and get it done? No promises, but it’ll probably make the world a better place.
PS: the photos are in chronological order.
Vankleek Hill Photos 