I was at Swaffham Raceway on Sunday 15th July with my step-son and his cousin who were there to race their Rookie Rods, and of course I was taking lots of photos, including some of the other formulas racing there. One of which was “SuperStox”:-
I’m not usually a huge fan of these so-called “proper” Stock Cars (some would argue “Stock Car Racing” is not the same thing as “Stock Cars” racing), and in particular I’ve never been into the Brisca F1 Stock Cars with their huge ridiculous roof-mounted “wings”, but these were, I guess, more F2 style stock cars, smaller, more “racy”, and with not so outlandish roof wings. Either way I took a load of photos of them, and the racing itself was quite good despite there not being many of them at the meeting.
After one of the heats a young lady approached me and asked if the photos I’d just taken would be posted anywhere for her to see, one of the racers was her father it transpired, and he’d just had a spin right in front of me which she saw me capture on my, I guess, fairly professional looking camera! All I could suggest was she look me up on Facebook and send me a friend request, so I could share my pictures with her. Not that I’ve got a problem with random people sending me friend requests but without intending any disrespect to the young lady I don’t know her and she doesn’t know me, is this really the best way for me to share my work with people, I asked myself?
No, was the answer I came up with, so I decided to create a public Facebook page dedicated to my photography, so in future if anyone asks I can just direct them to the page and not have to explicitly share anything with anyone. I spent a whole day trying to think of a name for this page, trying various combinations of my name, my wife’s name, our initials etc. and searching for those names to see if anyone else was using them. Nothing I came up with was unique and / or not cheesy as hell, so eventually, having created the page “Legend114” for Damian’s racing exploits I plumped for “Photo114”. The name is available as a Facebook username, so I could acquire the URL fb.me/photo114 and is also available as a .co.uk domain name should I wish to set up a dedicated website with it.
I knocked up cover and profile images and in less than a day Photo114 is live and a load of albums of my recent photos have been uploaded. I’ve even thought about having some business cards printed that I can hand out if I’m approached! Although this doesn’t mean I have pretensions of becoming a “professional” photographer, I realise I’d never be able to earn a living from it and wouldn’t really want to do it full time even though I enjoy it.