Inertia
I was reading Andreas’ post, A Thousand Beautiful Things, about hitting the 1,000 mark. Out of curiosity, I had a look at my own stats. I’ve been blogging since April 30, 2006, almost 39 months! All told, I’ve made 890 posts, though it is probably over 1,000, as on April 12, 2007, I accidentally hit the drop table button and lost all of my posts from January through that point in April, perhaps more. But this post is not about that.
It’s about inertia. I admire Andreas’ ability to find something to photograph every single day and to post about it. It takes lots of dedication and passion to do it. Anita was talking about here 2 year anniversary and her desire to post more often. I know that I could post more if I wanted to talk about equipment. Sometimes, I’m as much a gear head as the next guy, but most other times, I am very curious as to why I take pictures of the things that I do and frequently, I try to get outside of my photographic ‘box’.
Yesterday was such a day. I had spent the weekend in Augusta, GA and was to leave to return to Charleston, SC on Sunday. Usually, when I go somewhere, it’s a bee line. I want to get there with few stops in between. This is odd, because I am a stop and smell the roses kind of guy, but when driving, I just want to be away from behind the wheel. So, I made myself a promise when I left at 6:40 AM. Travel time was 2:20 between Augusta and Charleston. I told myself that I could get home no earlier then 10:00 AM. That would force me to shoot for an hour … so I did. As a matter of fact, I got home at 11:00 AM.
I took time to stop along the way and take photos of the various houses along the way where nature was reasserting herself … I’ll talk about those thoughts in another post. As I neared home, there was another place that I wanted to go that was about 30 minutes past my apartment. It was a real struggle to go because I just wanted to go back to the apartment … for what, I don’t know, but I didn’t. This place, near work, is fraught with all manner of photographic material, but it was getting close to 10:00 AM. The sun was already high in the sky and the shadows were getting deep. I nearly called it off, but I didn’t. I thought that I didn’t need ‘perfect’ light to photograph this area. As a matter of fact, I needed harsher light to bring out the textures and such.
When I got there, I spent about 45 minutes to an hour walking around and shooting. It was great to get out of my routine and do something different. I probably won’t post daily like Andreas, but I do have my own hand on my back making me try some different things!
You sure know how to stir up those resolutions to get out and do more. Your post deepens my resolve to get out with my camera more consistently, rather than working in binges. Congratulations on overcoming those objections.
Oh dear, don’t you hate that SPAM? Guys who comment on your blog just for another link to their site?
Anyway. Yes, it’s important to step out of the box at times. I just did it today. After some weeks of semi-paintings my Image of the Day (1005) is something completely different, an image devoid of meaning and therefore probably a fine vessel to collect whatever meaning is poured into it by the viewer. And there is more to come.
Of course the daily blogging can get in my way as well. It’s pretty hard to post an image a day and stay in any way consistent or keep with a particular project. Essentially you take what you get.
I don’t know, probably I will do kind of a side-project, something that I’ll follow for a while (and pretty regularly so), but that does not completely kill off everything else. I’m thinking of something like one mirror image in three days or, well, you get the idea. That would make for a more focused, project-like work, and I would run such a project as long as it were no chore, and then some other project, but something completely different. We’ll see.
I always struggle with the issue of how often to post. For a while, a long while, it was daily and not on just one but 2 blogs. Then I realized that it only became about posting something…anything. So I stepped back and re-evaluated. I got sporadic not posting on any schedule and even went nearly a month posting next to nothing. Last summer I decided to post every other day, identical posts on each blog since I had 2 separate audiences. But even now I am considering cutting that back again to 3 posts per week. One reason is the way I visit blogs. I visit so many photoblogs in the course of a week and I don’t do it daily so when I get around to them I find that there are sometimes as many as 10 posts to catch up with for a single photoblog. I end up missing a lot and I though that would be the same for others who “make their rounds”. So I am strongly considering cutting it back to posting only on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. That way I have a predictable schedule and I won’t feel pressured to post for the sake of posting and maybe it will be easier for my visitors to keep up to date with me. I will have time to plan ahead and hopefully it will work out well. I still haven’t decided but will soon. I’m leaning heavily in that direction. I like schedules…lol.
Got so caught up in my thoughts…forgot to mention how sweet the kitty shots are. He/She is giving you quite the eye.
@Laurie: As you can see, I don’t post daily anymore. I guess it just comes in fits and starts. I don’t even know that I could adhere to a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday schedule either. Sometimes I just have nothing to talk about, other times, I can be quite loquacious.
I had gotten into the posting just to post, but I rarely wrote anything ‘good’ when I did that.
While photographing the cat, who wouldn’t let me anywhere near, I was thinking about how the cat possibly changed. Perhaps it used to be someone’s pet, but it is now afraid of human contact. No amount of cajoling and sweet ‘Here … kitty … kitty … kitty’ calls could get her to come near.