When I was 12 years old, I became an avid photographer – somewhat of an obsessed little kid with a camera – snapping off photos left and right to add to the ever growing boxes of prints strewn around my bedroom.
Fast forward five years. I remember my seventeenth birthday. My dad brought out a wrapped present which turned out to contain my first digital camera, a shiny silver Olympus (I wish I could remember the model name).
Wow! The silver casing, the snazzy low-res digital images – I was sold.
1000s of pictures later, my hard drive had become an entangled snarl of directories, duplicate copies, and then one day – my secondary hard drive crashed. Wouldn’t boot up again. No matter what I tried, it was fried.
It was then that I realized the downside of using a digital camera – no negatives – no way to reproduce all of the shots I had lost. A piece of my life was gone and I had no way to get it back. Strange to say, but I did nothing about it. Like so many people, I just kind of blamed myself for not making a backup and moved on.
I moved to New Zealand, and fell of the digital grid for a while.
……
Then a few years ago, I started talking to a good friend of mine. I was finishing up college and taking tons of pictures with my Canon Digital Rebel. Pictures like these:
I was learning Photoshop and going crazy with my camera. We were inseparable. Then one day, I was talking to an old friend about the available services online for us photographers. Telling him about how you have to upload the same large file to 3 different sites to be able to share the photos, order prints, and sell them as stock photography. I started researching photo sites on the web. It seemed that there was no concept of giving photographers one place to put all of their stuff that would give them the functionality of all the websites out there for photographers. Suffice to say, soon after we started Photrade.
I met our co-founder, Dan, in the end of 2005. We started talking about the idea/project and formally began working on it in January 2006. Dan had a computer science degree from Brandeis and was amped to tackle a challenge like Photrade. The two of us set out to try to change the photo world… sounds so cheesy doesn’t it?
The next two years – which are much more emotional than I can express in words – take us to today. It’s surprising how heartbreaking and yet encouraging starting a business can be. If a day goes by where I’m not singing on top of a mountain followed moments later by tearing out the remaining hairs on my head, well I’ll be flabbergast.
Jokes aside, it’s been a tempestuous ride to try to create the dream we came up with a few years ago. Looking at http://www.photrade.com now though, we’re getting closer than ever before. Now more and more people are helping us to create the dream of a simple way for Photographers to get all the benefits the web has to offer – for free.
www.photrade.com 