Artist embraces world wide web
by Claire Miglionico
Photo by Josh Naud. Randy Gibson is portrayed here at Caffe Beano. He shares that he does not particularly like his photo to be taken.
Meet Randy Gibson, local freelance photography guru who shoots at pretty much anything that moves. He is the proud creator of multiple blogs that showcase his creative endeavors. He devotes a lot of his time updating his blogs, getting up every morning for coffee and just “going at it for hours,” he said in a meetup at cosy neighborhood coffee Caffe Beano.
“A lot of that is sometimes preparing a work to be put up on the Internet. I would consider that blog time because it takes time. Also, a huge part of it is reading. Oh God, I read somany.IgetupandIreadtwo or three news sites and then I read my blogs,” he said. Photography runs in the family. Gibson’s father used to bring him to air shows as a kid.
“I remember (my dad) always having a camera. He had big long lenses and he would take photos of airplanes at the air shows and he would let me shoot. He’s basically the inspiration behind a lot of my interest in (photography),” he said. Gibson remembers acquiring his first camera in Grade 2; he won a cross country race where the prize was a camera. He says he still owns it to this day.
Gibson started blogging seven years ago at age 21. He says early blogging was very similar to writing an email, which was apparently quite boring compared to present-day blogging.
“Blogging wasn’t really that popular per se when I first started dicking around with the Internet and the only reason I was dicking with the Internet wastogetmyphotosupona web site. Blogging came quite a bit after. I got into blogging because it became easy and I’ve tried every blogging platform there is under the sun and I’ll tell you what, they’ve come an awful long way,” he said.
Gibson struggled to identify his many blogs. He has a blog named randygibson. tumblr.com on his photo web site, RandysBigPicture and RandysBigVideo blogs that can be found on blogging site Tumblr — which Gibson favors for its practicality — a collaborative blog called The Modern Leisure and Vimeo and Flickr accounts where he posts videos and photos accordingly. He also contributes to calgaryisawesome.com on a regular basis.
“Maintaining all this shit used to stress me out a lot but I’ve just come to the fact that I started them all for certain reasons and I should just stick with that, you know what I mean? The only thing I would ever do is hopefully one day just give them all their own dot coms,” he said.
Gibson has daily blog readers from around the world and has tracked up to 500 people a day browsing his BigPictures blog. “Everything is so digital now. I feel like it’s easier to get an audience in the sense that you can shoot a photo, go home, put it on your computer and it can be on the Internet accessible to the Earth — for all instances and purposes — within 10 minutes and I love that,” he said.
“Facebook has helped me get a lot of readers because you can connect Tumblr to Facebook and vice versa. The way Facebook spreads information amongst friends and users is incredible. It gets people to click — they love clicking you know — so you just got to get them there.” Blogging has been extremely rewarding for Gibson.
He said: “ I’ve met some amazing people through that, through them being like ‘I love your blog, let’s go out for a coffee.’ There was a time where there was a stigma around that, that it was kind of creepy but this is life now. It’s like the world is changed and the technology is there (so) we should embrace it, you know?” “ One thing I would love the world to know is that better gear does not make you a better artist. Technology is so amazing now you don’t need fancy things,” he concluded.
