brandiboyd.com

I’m a rather private person in some ways, and not so much in others. I have lots of friends who don’t hesitate to share all their pictures online and never once think about it. And, as the person my family turns to for technology, I’m always saying “let me just put that online and you can get it there” when I’m taking shots at events. Then I get home and I get all privacy concious. Do I want the whole web to be able to view my family pics?

Not like it’s anything weird or embarrasing. Family photos, vacations. A large collection of vintage Hedges family photos. A disturbing amount of cat pics. When I roam around on other people’s sites, I always enjoy clicking through their pictures. It tells me a lot about them as people beyond the code or article I’m reading. And I know if my other family members had their pictures online, I would just love it.

I think the thing for me is, that living as a ‘public woman’ invites a fair amount more attention than a man, and in no small ways, this canbe very dangerous and scary It’s a bit creepy looking at how my stats jump anytime I post a photo. Combined with how easy it is to cyberstalk someone. I’m not hiding from anyone. I’m just … private. Which is why I probably wouldn’t want to use Flikr or some other service much. And I’m safety conscious about being a single woman.

That said… I’ve been promising to do this for a long time, so here is the start to my online photo collection.

This is a set of photos I took of the big sky of Amherst, West Texas, at my grandmother’s home a few summers ago. I spent the summer cleaning up the house after she and my aunt passed, leaving a 16 room house filled to the brim with ephemera of a life of teaching and shopping for Christmas. It was a very temperate summer; I saw wildflowers in late June - the latest I’ve ever seen them (in fact I don’t ever remember seeing them) in this part of the panhandle. We had several amazing storms roll across the plains that turned the sky brilliant shades of red, purple, black, green, and blue, and these are the photos I took.