Keith's Odyssey to Planet Fitness: The bots love me, hope you do too

Monday, September 15, 2025

The bots love me, hope you do too

A little while ago my readership stats, such as they are, went crazy. I've always taken them with a huge grain of salt partly because I didn't know what they were measuring, and partly because I'm not trying to reach the world, or monetize it, or otherwise get rich.

Not that photographers get rich anymore, and not that many ever did. There's a joke I think I've told. Q: How do you become a rich and famous photographer? A: Become rich and famous somehow, and then pick up a camera and call yourself a photographer.

I actually chatted with someone at an event not that long ago, and they asked me if one could make a living as a photographer. The answer is complicated, but the short version is probably not purely as a photographer. It's probably best if photography is part of the package.

It used to be that being a photographer required a lot of skill, and that pretty well determined how well your photography business went. The act of taking the photos and then dealing with the film and prints was much more complicated. Now, everybody thinks they're a photographer with their fancy iPhone and that photography is free or should be. The important skill now is marketing oneself. If you're popular and well known, an "influencer" (and geez I hate that term) it's probably easy to find paid work as a photographer, regardless of your skill or lack of it with a camera.

It's sort of like writers. There used to be a thing called a mid-list author. They rarely or never topped the best seller lists, but they reliably produced a book every year or so that sold a reliable number of copies. The writers wrote, editors edited, and publicity agents publicized. That's all gone. Now they expect the writer to do it all, when all they really want to do is get up at a civilized hour, drink coffee and procrastinate for a while, then write. They typically don't want to deal with icky public except to show up at book signings (if any) and fan conventions (if invited.)

Back to the topic. I flat out don't believe what Blogger is telling me, than hundreds of people are reading my blog. If I dig a bit deeper into the Google stats, which I hadn't even known were there, I get a much much smaller and more realistic number. How much smaller? Orders of magnitude smaller. I'm quite sure I could host all my regular readers and their spouses at the same time during a house party. Maybe if some of the periodic readers showed up as well it might spill into the back yard, or get a bit crowded in the kitchen. Except some of them don't live near here and it would be difficult for them to show up. None the less, I appreciate all my readers.

I'm busy packing camera equipment for the New Brunswick trip and thinking about how much film to bring. I was reading an article that the fall colours might not be as vibrant this year because of the dry conditions. It will be whatever it will be, and I'm sure I'll still have fun. I'm anticipating blogging fairly often, complete with photos while there, since the new laptop runs Lightroom just fine. Unlike the Newfoundland trip last year, where I essentially didn't blog at all.

So since I'm thinking about travel, here's the last photos from the last road trip out to Big Hill Springs park.