About LinkAge Photo - What's In A Name?
2015-11-13: My goal, first and foremost, with the rebranding and unification of okdigital.ca and canadarama.ca, is to simplify. There was some benefit to having one website for the business end and one for the artistic, but the two aspects are so intertwined and overlapping it makes sense at this point to combine them. Changing the official business name from 'Okanagan Digital Photography' to 'LinkAge Photo' was consistent with this simplification as well as having fairly significant links to what I do.
Broadly speaking, I don't think there is much doubt that we now live in the 'link age'. It started with digital computers, then the internet, and now of course with social media. These links have joined us together, globally, like never before. The world is smaller because of them. History will likely refer to it more as the 'Digital Age' but personally, I like the image that the term 'linkage' conjures; the smooth, meshed harmony of all parts working together in a well-oiled machine.
On the other hand, I also like to visualize the graphic of the walking ape, you know the one, that morphs into neanderthal, and then into homo sapiens. I suppose that human now, would be shown with some sort of device attached, linked perhaps, and interesting to imagine what the future 'person' will look like fifty or one hundred years from now. Homo Sapiens v.2?
On another linkage level, the digital world and again social media, have given us access to a plethora of images. Photos of course but graphics too, and video. These images connect us. They link our worlds. Today, "a picture paints a thousand words" about a million times a second. And the real beauty is that it's a two way street. Not only do we get to see images from places on (or even off) the planet that we may never get to visit in person, but we get to share our own images, our own personal journey with just as curious and intrigued visitors from anywhere else we are linked to.
And then there is the historical linkage perspective. I think every museum I've ever experienced has panoramic images. Usually older, black and white or sepia-toned, often aged and weathered. Going outside the traditional 'framed' pictures can often tell more of a story, with a specific time, place and an overview or 'lay of the land', as it was at that particular moment. That's often in my mind when I capture panoramic images, especially cityscapes. It gives me a sense of purpose sometimes, to imagine the historical record that each image represents. The 2010 Vancouver Olympics are a good example of a time and place, not likely to be repeated in the near future. I hope that a panorama or two of mine might be seen long after I'm gone, and help link future ages, to our time.
Finally, all of my panoramas consist of many inidividual photos, blended and linked together to form the finished image. As few as 6 but as many as 20 or more. Each individual frame is something in and of itself, but through the linkage of all of them together, something larger is formed. If I wasn't living now in this link age, none of this would be possible. For me personally, capturing the peripheral helps me re-live the experience of being there. And maybe it links me, to that age in my life :)