Ryan Pyle Blog: My 100th Blog

Hello.

Well, it might not mean much beyond beyond my office, in the spare bedroom of my apartment, but this is my 100th blog. And that excites me deeply. In the first year or so of my blog the rhythm was sporadic at best, only finding the time or having the nerve to blog when my blood was boiling about something or another. In the second half of last year I finally put that to rest and found that blogging became therapeutic and for the few readers or followers out there, I really appreciate your comments and personal emails; very motivating.

I started blogging in September 2006, while I was sitting in a Paris hotel room on my way back from a photo festival in the south of France. The festival was interesting but it wasn't exactly my cup of tea. While I appreciated seeing all the work and the exhibitions the general atmosphere was a bit too much for me. I haven't been back since. But although my absence from the festival is noted, the lessons I learned from that festival have traveled with me and been implemented throughout my career and life.

It was just after this photo festival that I worked out a new game plan for myself, and I designed a much more refined focus for my work. It was a real growth experience. I think prior to that Perpignan festival I was just happy to be taking pictures and making my rent payments on time, but after that I really decided how I wanted my career to play out. I mentally turned a corner that helped me decide what I needed to do, and how I needed to approach my work, to have the possibility to work with some element of freedom to pursue topics that I felt were important.

When I stop and think about it, I have a very unique roll. I have committed myself to documenting China in the long term and I've been lucky enough, and developed to an acceptable level, to work for some of the leading magazines around the world. That means that I have a real responsibility to maintain strong ethics and high journalism standards in my work. And equally important is to not waste any time, because the country is really rolling along and it takes a huge effort to play catch up trying to document it all.

It was after that trip that I began investing more and more of my income in to personal projects. I also began began pursuing competitions / awards, grants and sponsorship more aggressively; although to this end my results have been only mildly successful. More work is clearly needed.

Whatever the results of personal projects, and or grants and awards the key factor at the end of the day is still freedom. If you take in to account that there are only 365 days a year and each person only has so many days they can work, so many hours they can stare through a view finder on a camera it is really important to maximize those rare moments when we can just simply work; without distraction or delay.


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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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