Keith's Odyssey to Planet Fitness: Fractions

Friday, December 5, 2025

Fractions

I hated fractions doing grade school arithmetic. I didn't get them at all, and the rules for manipulating them seemed arcane. Then again, there was a lot of school that I didn't get.

When I was doing lots of training for triathlon, fractions were part of what kept me going and helped keep count. 4 laps was 1/10th of a Km. Some number of meters during a run was a fraction of the desired distance. Oddly enough, the first segments were hard, and it seemed like it would take forever to finish, but then the last ones weren't so bad and sometimes I'd push further, just because. Plus thinking about the math in my head was a distraction from whatever might be hurting.

We were talking last night and realized this year was 11/12th's gone. Zoom. Into the Xmas season, and I'm not feeling jolly in the slightest. Then again, I'm not typically a jolly kind of guy. Maybe I just need to eat another of the chocolate coconut cookies I really like, get my blood sugar up.

I've been in a bit of a creative rut the last little while. I watched a really good video about sequencing photographs in a book. Why this order and not that order, and which are the best. The crucial question that drives the whole thing is, what is the story?

The story drives which photos get selected and in which order they are presented. Probably far fewer photos than you'd think. Only the best of the best.

Which is what got me into the rut. I wanted to do another year book called 2025 in Photographs, along the lines of the one I did for 2024. It's a big but slender book with only 20 photos. There isn't really a story to them, just the best 20 photos in chronological order, with a tiny little bit of text about each. That at least is straightforward, sort of like a wider pass at Image of the Year.

I also wanted to do a New Brunswick book, similar to the New Zealand, Newfoundland, and 2 Yukon books. Of which only the one Yukon book (Memories of Sunset at the Arctic Circle) has only the vaguest sense of a story to it that drives the order of the images.

It's the conflict between the two current books that has me puzzled. Many of the best photos of the year are from the New Brunswick trip, and the overlap is driving me nuts. Yes, I know they're two separate books, and if I'd been on the ball the New Brunswick one would have been done in time for the amazing Blurb sales over American Thanksgiving, and the 2025 book would have been done in early 2026.

Except not. My bad. Except I tell myself that creativity sometimes requires some contemplation time. Some time for the brain to run in neutral and process things that are not yet clear. I'm not sure how much space there is between such a break, and outright sloth.

There are more than 750 edited photos from New Brunswick, which is way way too many for a book, and there's only about 18 that I really really like which is a bit too few, especially since they don't really go together. There are some number of other photos I really really like from the rest of 2025, so getting a 2025 book of 20 photos in chrono order is straightforward. The New Brunswick book is not. There are too many 'there I was photos', and not enough stunners.

As you know I've been going back over old photos to see which I can improve on with my new skills, such as they are. That's been fun. In case you hadn't heard, I'm wincing at lots of them, and realize I need to update some of the photos on my photoblog and Loungecat Productions page. What I thought was good back then might not be considered so good now.

Lots of photographers talk about intentional photos, and I've been struggling with that a bit. Much of my photography has been going for a walk or drive and taking photos of what I see. There's been some stunningly good photos, and lots more that are what I call, 'there I was and this is what I saw.' Most of those are functional, in that they show you what I was looking at, hopefully with a bit of flair or personal viewpoint. They were opportunistic, not intentional. Let's say I'm struggling with the intention just now.

I knew it would take a long time, but the off site backup storage process is happening. It said I started with well over a million files taking up 7.5 TB, and now, after 2 weeks of running pretty well 24 hours a day, I have 467,000 files taking up 6.006 TB remaining. It seems a little odd to me that roughly half the files take up 1/7th of the space. Then again, I don't know exactly how it counts things. I suppose if I'd been on the ball I'd have found a buddy with super-fast fibre internet.

Here's a few more of the recent edits.

1. During a night sky photography weekend in Jasper. Which was disappointing because you'd think that such photographers would be really considerate about how much light they created. Not. Ever so much not, though it does can lead to interesting photos like this, once I opened up the shadows and tweaked things a bit. Yes, there was a chorus of shouted 'turn your lights off!'