★ Two Million Views: Thank you.

Stats for your account: 2,001,067

This is the number I awoke to this morning. It took 3 years to get to 1 million views and another year to arrive at 2 million. This is the momentum I was hoping for when I became serious about photography in early 2009. Since I was a child, cameras always interested me and I never traveled without begging my mom for a disposable camera. Even in my pre-teen years, family members would ask me to take the portraits because they said, “for a kid, you always take the best pictures”. I’ve always had a knack for framing.

Believe it or not, I sold all of my cameras to finance the move from Florida to San Francisco in 2008 and didn’t buy a new camera until 2009 when I could finally afford one. I purchased a Canon G10 after Liana Lehua allowed me to use her G9 for 6 months. Soon, I was shooting in manual leaving that comfort zone of Auto mode. I realized the built-in flash does more harm than good and I found the value of a tripod.

From March 2009 to April 2011, I’ve owned eight cameras and will soon get my 9th. Each camera is slightly better than the last and each camera has pushed me to take on more radical shooting methods. Also, my post-processing work has simplified to the point where I don’t really do much to my images after the fact. Other than modifying contrast, exposure and perhaps the shadows is all I do. This is a result of better photography and relying much less on software.

I also wouldn’t be where I am without the thousands of people who have looked at my photos and the thousands of blogs, newspapers and websites that have used my pictures. Most of them haven’t credited me but a lot have so thank you for that.

I love taking photos and love capturing life and other photographers don’t publish their Flickr stats but, to me, 2 million is a lot and I’m just thrilled that I’ve had the chance to share my work, life, adventures and experiences with you all one photo at a time.

Of the 11,500 photos I have on Flickr, 68 of those have never received a single view. All of my photos are geotagged and 1,000 of the 11K+ photos have received at least one comment. 700 of my photos have been favorited.

In total, I’ve had 1.2 million photo views, 350K photostream views followed by 438K views of my photo sets.

It’s a huge accomplishment and I’m grateful you have all taken the time to view my photos. Here is to a few million more views over the next year.