Tuesday 19 January 2010

My Online (Photographic) Life

It has again been quite awhile since I have posted anything of interest here. Well, one could argue that very little of what I post here will be of interest to anyone but me. But anyway … Looking back over pervious years, I always have a slow period over the fall/winter when it comes to postings and photography in general. The winter blues and all. It’s also been a busy year with the addition of another little one to the family, so I do have a good excuse again this time.

In particular, I haven’t been posting many images at all to the blog. This is largely due changes in my ‘online workflow’. I wrote during the summer about my experiment with an online portfolio on Zenfolio. That’s still there, but I have also started using Flickr as well. So I’ve now got two other places I’m posting photos on the ‘net, and this blog has fallen by the wayside.

I’ve worked out a method to this online madness to help me again get a handle on my photography as I mentioned in my earlier post. These days I’m dealing with my images this way:

1) Shoot, download, sort, edit, etc, the computer. After going through all this I’ll usually end up with 3-4 images from a particular shoot or timeframe that I think might be ‘keepers’.

2) These keepers get posted to Flickr to share and maybe get some feedback, and to again give me a chance to live with them a little.

3) Eventually, I find that of those 3-4, there may be one that will stand out. This one then goes to Zenfolio, which I’m essentially using as a ‘best of’ portfolio.

And of course, I’m still printing some prints, sticking them on my board, and so on.

You’ll notice the blog is missing from this process. I started to blog largely as a way to share some photos, but it’s really become a sounding board for organizing my thoughts on photography. Particularly where my photography is going, what I’m up to photographically, and just occasional random nonsense (like the post just prior to this one). It’s working well for me this way, so I will continue for the foreseeable future. And I will continue to post my images here as well, whenever there is something to say about them.

So, here are a few words about the image at the top of the post. This is one of those serendipitous moments. I shot this off the cuff while out photographing in the backyard. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but after going through the 40-50 images from that short session in the snow, this is the one that stood out. It had been a very cold, windy day, and the lake ending up freezing like this. It makes me think of an Apollo mission, as the spacecraft passes over the surface of the moon, just as they pass from the dark to the sunlight side of the Moon. I’m still ‘living’ with this one, but I think it might be the one to save from that set.

Take This Camera ... Please*

This isn't directly photography related, but I had a laugh when I saw this on Kijiji a few days ago. See the two circled ads.
* With apologies to Henry Youngman.