About a year ago, I received an e-mail invitation from Living In HD to see its webinar. I think LiHD must have gotten my e-mail address from the registration for the Panasonic products that my family bought. It was a pleasant surprise to get an invitation to join a "club." And since membership was gratis, non-exclusive, and initiation free, I hopped aboard.

"Bejeweled." This photo was taken most recently and one that sums up my interest in still life drawing and photography. I know there aren’t too many photos of faces in my collection. I hope I’m not boring the community.

Like with anything in life, photography takes practice.

Carry a camera around, no matter how simple or small. It's fine to take snapshots of anything that delights you. You could see meaning in the photos later. More importantly, you would discover a lot about yourself. See the trends in your actions and try to understand how and why you feel what you feel about the pictures.

Learn from historical photos, especially the Pulitzer Prize ones and those that you might have seen in a museum or textbook. There are reasons why those images were worth keeping. At the same time, though, look at trendy magazines, posters, and billboards. Learn what and why commercial images sell so well and why they appeal so quickly. Look at winning photos in contests too. Notice the trends in judging and publication. There’s a great deal to understand about humanity in art.

Get behind and in front of the camera. Understand the dynamics between the artist and the model. Strangely, this is not so easy for many, and that’s why there are issues about being camera-shy or non-photogenic. If one understood the process and the product, these issues won't arise.

Really understand all the buttons on your device and all the functions on photo softwares. Photography, after all, is a mechanical medium. Ultimately, the goal of making art is training your eyes to see art, though however subjective. Photography is about stopping time, the capture of a moment in time. It takes only one press of a button to do it, but a lifetime to see it all together.

I have gained a close community of friends. I think this is what photo networking should be about. It shouldn’t be about a large impersonal site that knows only the statistics of its membership, downloads, or hits. It should be about the people who joined.