Some colourful introspection

So, back to a photography book again. This one.

Most of them I'd never heard of. Which is not a surprise; I've never been to an art school, or have a formal photography education. I'm just me, carrying around a camera and taking photos of what interests me. Some of it interests other people enough that they drop in and look at some of my work, which is nice. Some, most, or all of which doesn't interest other people and that's fine too.

They mostly talk about how they got started and the work that made them known. There's typically only one photo for each, and no idea how they picked it out. It was interesting reading about their take on photography, what interests them and why. I note that of the 50, 35 were born before 1960, making the youngest of them senior citizens. The youngest photographer mentioned was born in 1980, and so was 36 when the book was published.

I get that it takes some time and experience to make a name for yourself, and  that it's fully possible for someone who is 78 to be actively working. But more than 10% of the 'contemporary' photographers are almost 80? That's a bit of a stretch for me. Maybe I'm wrong about what contemporary means.

Lately I've been thinking about what interests me and why, and what do I want to spend my remaining time working on? What's important enough to me that I want to get up in the morning and work on? Some kids know what they want to be when they grow up; but I've never known that. I don't even know it now, but if I'm going to get anything done, I'd better be about it.

In the short term, here we are almost mid-November, and I'm only a few blogs shy of my most productive blogging year ever. Not counting this one, I've got 45 more to do before the New Year, and I've got 51 days to do it. No special reason, mainly just to say that I published something once a day on average for a year.

I just realized that I can say that now. I blogged just over once a day for all 2019, then in 2018, I hit publish 31 days in December, 30 days in November, 31 days in October, 31 days in September. August I slacked off and only blogged 29 times. Still, it's easier to say a specific year. Forward ho!

That said, I'm not going to do that next year, I know that now. I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet, but I think I'm going to continue blogging, but maybe more like weekly, or something between weekly and daily. I'm looking at Spark to publish content because photos on that platform look great. But each one is stand alone, so there needs to be another platform to tie them together. That might be this blog, but might not.

I think the time has come to make a push and get the long worked on novel(s) in a shape to self publish. That might be the big goal for 2020, to start pushing out chunks of that.

I've often talked about taking fewer, more interesting photos, and that certainly will be a focus. That gets me back to, interesting to who? For me, certainly, and maybe you, but probably not the mob that only likes cats and sunsets. I'd like to think that some of my work will be a bit challenging in some ways.

Maybe like this. It's a photo of a real thing, not a Photoshop construct.

Deadwood of the Day