Friday Q&A: Photographs of People Over 50 Doing Yoga

Bob Kubik, Age 79

Q: I sent my photo in to your photo contest, and noticed that it wasn’t included in your photo gallery. Is that because you rejected my photo? And now I’ve noticed the two photo galleries are no longer even on your site. What’s up with that? Where did all the photos go and what are you doing with them?

A: First off, I’d like to say, thank you so much, everyone, for sending and continuing to send such wonderful photos! If you’re on Facebook and are following our Yoga for Healthy Aging Facebook page, you’ll know that we’ve been sharing these photos five days a week as our Photo of the Day, and these photos are extremely popular. The photo of Bob Kubik above, for example, was shared over 200 times, and got over 20,000 views (can’t remember the exact numbers). I’m really excited that we’ve been able to use social media to spread images of older people doing yoga, in both simple and challenging poses, to counteract the media trend of only portraying thin, young, white women. Here’s another popular one:

Gel Brown, Age 76

And to make sure you all know that older women can do fancy arm balances, too, here's Leslie Greinstein doing the same pose as Bob Kubik above:

Leslie Greinstein, age 62

But what I didn’t foresee is how difficult it would be to maintain the photo galleries. The blog format isn’t really set up well to have pages that contain hundreds of photographs, so very quickly, I became overwhelmed and stopped updating them.

So, in answer to your first question: If I rejected your photo, I sent you a message explaining why. If I did not reply, that’s because I liked the photo and will be using it somewhere, some day—maybe just on our Facebook page or maybe one day in one of our posts. 

In answer to your second question: I realized recently that the galleries were hopelessly out of date and that updating them would be very time consuming (I probably would need to have several pages, organized alphabetically or something). So I decided it would be best for me to just take them down. I hope you’re not too disappointed about this. (Right now, it is me and only me who does all the work of editing, formatting, indexing, finding pictures for, etc. all the posts on our blog.)

Where did the photos go? Well, they’re all still on my computer, organized nicely, so I can look through them whenever I need a photo of an older person doing yoga. And what I’m doing with them is posting them on Facebook, five days a week, and using them to illustrate certain posts on our blog when I find one that is appropriate. 

Now this is going to sound kind of crazy after I said that I was overwhelmed with dealing with the photos, but I actually would love people to send me more photos (see Photo Contest: Open for All People Over 50 for information about what I’m looking for). That’s because I’m starting to run low on fresh photos for the Facebook Photo of the Day feature, and because that feature is so popular, I’d like to keep offering new photos for as long as I can. 

Bottom Line: Even though we no longer have photo galleries, I’d love for you to continue to send me photos for me to share on Facebook and to use in blog posts. I'd especially like to have more photographs of people of color, like this beautiful one of De Jur, as I have received only a few of those. 

De Jur, Age 57

Just be sure to read the instructions at Photo Contest: Open for All People Over 50 so you can be sure your photo meets our requirements.

—Nina

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