My New Personal Blog: blog.alexblack.ca (Thursday, October 01, 2009, )

You might not know this about me, but photography is a part time profession for me. My full time career is in software development. Back in 1998 (while still at the University of Waterloo) I started two small tech companies with my friend Chris, and we worked our asses off trying to build them up fulltime for 7 years from 2000 to 2007. At our peak we had 15 employees, and over $1 million in revenues, most from consulting work under BrightBlocks, but some from multimedia yearbook sales through Booksoft. By 2007 it was clear that Booksoft's multimedia yearbook product was not gaining much traction, at our peak we had 50 schools and organizations using our products and services, but we didn't make much money off each one unfortunately. (Looking back, we had an online community that was included with each CD-ROM yearbook, much like a very early and simple facebook... Damn, if only we'd done online yearbooks!). Later that year our main consulting client defaulted on payments leaving us hanging, so we then shut down both businesses.

I'd been interested in photography for years, and so when in 2006 I got married something awakened and I started to persue wedding photography at first as a hobby and then as a 2nd career. In 2007 I was the most serious about I've been and photographed 17 weddings that summer. After that summer though I realized it was too much work for 2nd career, so I had a decision to make, should I make it a fulltime career or scale it back? My first passion is in technology, and honestly I'm better at than I am at photography. The parts of photography that I am best at in fact are the technology skills (lenses, flashes, settings, photoshop, etc). So after losing my entire summer to wedding photography, photographing weddings every weekend, editing photos all night during the week, and working days at my day job, I decided to stop seeking wedding photography clients, instead I now photograph 1 or 2 weddings here and there for friends.

I've just recently quit my job at Primal Fusion where I was Director of Platform Architecture to start a new company. I'll be blogging about this new company and other news at my personal blog. Please follow me there!

http://blog.alexblack.ca

- Alex