I love these shots of Red posing in front of the donkeys who are posing in front of the sheep. All my animals know about cameras, and they are happy to pause and preen and be still for me. They know where the hay comes from, I think and see I always have a camera hanging off my shoulder, they see it as just another part of me.

Lots of people lately have asked if I would consider publishing a Bedlam Farm Calendar, but if I am slow to learn, I do eventually get there, and I am wise to this bait and switch. This request gets strong during the holidays, traditional calendar buying time.  Whenever I put a particular kind of photo, I get a slew of messages from people suggesting it be sold as a print, a notecard, turned into a book or children’s book or put into a calendar. It took me several years to get onto the fact that enthusiastic people are quick to say I should sell something, but slow to buy something when I do. I have many matted photographs and notecards to testify to this phenomena. A woman from Florida send me a nearly desperate message urging me to write a children’s book about Lenore so she could give them to her children.

I told her to go to Amazon or her bookstore and check out the two children’s books that I have written about Lenore. She wrote back to say they looked great and she would put them on her wish list for next year, as things were a little right. The Internet has turned print publishing on its ear. In an era where tens of millions of people are taking photos and videos, using art programs and trawling the Net for free stuff (including mine), the idea of buying images is fading. Few people buy calendars when they carry one on their pocket all day. And fewer and fewer people are buying hardcover books. An editor warned me about spending too much time putting things up on my blog. One day, he said, people will have no need of reading your books, they can just read you ever day for free. This is sometimes true, I know, I can feel it.  There are  photos of animals here every day. But I told my editor that one day the blog would be my book, and that idea has only grown in my creative consciousness.

Digital photography has democratized an art, and there are tens of millions of people taking great photos by the billions every week. Why would people spend money buying images of other people when they can have so many for free? I wish it were otherwise, at least my bank account does. It is expensive to prepare photos for sale or print out notecards. Calendars are fading out just as expensive print photography is not selling to many people. The Internet is the birthplace of free stuff on a grand scale, and it seems to push the price of everything down to the lowest common denominator. In our culture, you can never blame people for wanting to pay less for things, or get things for free. Big corporations know how to manipulate this impulse and get a lot of money out of people. Small creative entrepeneurs generally do not.

This next year, I hope to expand my catalogue of e-books, which people are buying. And I will keep writing hard paper books, which some people are still buying. When writers and photographers lament this new world, I always think and say the same thing. We don’t have any special license to be preserved or subsidized. We have to go where people go, and they are not going to framed photographs, notecards or calendars. Maria disagrees with me. She has sold hundreds of my notecards at her site and she urges me all of the time, as other people do, to sell them in photo, notecard, even calendar form. Much as I love and respect her, I don’t agree. I don’t have the heart for it. People who say they would like to see me make things are Houdini’s in my mind, they often seem to vanish when the things they want to see are up for sale. It is just human nature, I think.

This makes me sad sometimes, but the truth is, I love giving the photos away for free and I don’t love spending money to make things people no longer really want to buy. I think of my free photos – I don’t watermark them, they are yours to use, unless told otherwise  –  as little angels sailing out into the universe carrying messages of light and meaning. That is better, I think, than selling calendars.