It's been a minute. Or two. Many

Today is a bit of a roundup, it being so long since the last blog post. I almost don't know where to start. 

Let's start with books. I've been working on a novel for decades now, and it keeps growing in the telling. It's up to 5 inter related works of various lengths. Don't hold your breath waiting for it. Photo books are another thing. Starting late August and throughout September I've been working on photo books. A couple of them are test books, done to see how my photos look in print. The advantage of calling it a test book is that you aren't under the pressure of perfection. Nobody else need see it.

A couple are big lay flat books from travels to Yukon and New Zealand. All who have seen them have complimented me on the quality of the photos and the books. During our recent pre-Thanksgiving trip to visit Linda's sisters we distributed a book of family photos, and that went over very well. During our trip another book got delivered, and it's due to be passed on to the recipient at the next opportunity. 

I'm not sure what the next book will be. There's some ideas percolating. There's a couple considerations here. One is to have the photos that will make up a coherent collection. The photos might relate to a trip, a person, or a particular subject. The other is the discount. Blurb sometimes offers discounts, and that might affect what I work on. The New Zealand book had a fabulous discount that applied to the book and shipping. That very much encouraged me to go big. But a 10% discount on a $20 book doesn't make much difference. My thinking is to have a book or two in the pipeline, ready to go when they have a promotion.

Over the first bunch of years for the blog photos were pretty rare. Then about this time of year in 2010 I got an iPhone and photos started showing up a bit more often. Then a 'real' camera in 2016, and the photos began to pick up, in both quantity and quality. Somewhere along the way I started a second blog that's more oriented to photography, with tabs for races and community events, plus the Image of the Month feature.

Which, as you've probably noticed, is not today's blog, even though it's October. I'm still going through the nearly 1000 photos from the trip. One of them will almost certainly be IotM. I just don't know which one yet. Hang tough, it might be a couple more days. The problem isn't the actual editing, it's the selection of which photo to edit, out of any number of similar photos. For example, I've never photographed a lake freighter cargo ship before, and Linda's sister lives in a house with a great view of the St. Lawrence Seaway. There's several photos of ships, but I'm not sure I've figured out the best way to go about it. I'm pretty sure I could become a boat nerd, hanging out on their dock waiting for ships, trying different ideas, waiting for the light. I'd probably learn to start drinking margaritas, and things might go downhill fast.

I'd like to welcome some new subscribers to the blog, and hope you enjoy the experience. I've been thinking about the decline in blogging overall, and the decline my my blogging. For most of the blog I put out a new blog post every day and a half or so on average. In 2019 I peaked out at a new blog published slightly more often than once a day, with 367 over the year. Going to New Zealand for nearly 2 months, and Yukon will do that. Both are amazingly photogenic places. 

Blogging in the 2020's has been tough, and it averages out to a blog every 2.5 days or so. I'd like to blame COVID, but that dog won't hunt. It seems I don't have as much to say as I once did. When I was doing regular workouts and working for a living the blogs almost wrote themselves.

But I'm going to continue. I'm not sure exactly where it's going to go. I think this blog will be more day to day, topical depending on my moods. I'm sort of thinking the blog might be a way to group photos and do some trial writing in prep for a book. The photoblog will be for the IotM, community and race events, and a bit of a portfolio of my better photos, plus talking more about film photography or more technical digital photography topics. The Loungecat site is designed to be a portfolio of my very best work, and it needs to be updated a bit.

Some photos from a July road trip south east of Calgary. Look back in the blog roll to July to see more from this trip. For new readers you missed a steam locomotive in the wild and the owl.

I like getting photos that nobody else on the trip gets. So the one right above this, I'm pretty sure everybody else got it. But this one, by definition, nobody else got.

I can't now understand why this one didn't end up on the podium for July IotM.

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Driftwood (BC)

Linda

Peony

Flower

Celina

We had some friends taking care of Celina in our absence. There were several videos of her happily purring away on the fuzzy blanket she loves. On our return she of course simultaneously claimed to be the most abandoned cat in the history of cats, and that we're the most rotten humans ever and where are the good humans that took care of her. I don't think we're quite forgiven yet.

Yukon

It was fun watching the pilots and passengers loading up a plane for a trip to somewhere out in the bush. 

Film (new) Fish Creek.

Film (old)

Linda, from the trove of B&W negatives. It was fun to look at them with Linda's aunts. They remembered the photos of them as young women, and were able to identify some of the people in the photos.