3219 - The Cliff I

I haven’t stopped hearing music, not at all, but I do it as I’ve done it for years now: mostly on the train, more as a background while working or blogging, often to shield against background talk. It’s not the most attentive way and it is not the way musicians would want their art to be listened to, more abuse than anything else, but that’s the way it is now.

Basically choices have to be made, and currently my choice is for reading. I still enjoy photography and I still enjoy post-processing. These are creative acts, or in reality it is one act for me, the act of image creation. Taking the image in-camera is part of it, exploring and enhancing the image on the computer is another part. Both are deeply satisfying, both are complementary to my programming-related work.

I enjoy blogging as well, I still do after all those years, even if I frequently don’t have much to say, but I while I have gladly complicated it with self-imposed rules for years, I now feel the need to relax most of them.

In reality that process has started a long time ago. Originally I have posted every day an image taken and processed that day, along with a title taken from a song. The song had to be from my own collection of CDs and it had to be available on YouTube. That worked astoundingly well, because I’ve bought thousands of CDs over two and a half decades.

I found though, that many song titles don’t work as image titles. The other problem is, that I am a collector. “Summertime” or “On The Sunny Side Of The Street”? I have lots and lots of versions, but they all must count as the same title. OK, It became very tedious, thus no songs any more.

Daily? Yes, that’s important to me. Once you have an unbroken chain of 3219 posts, the decision to break it is nothing taken lightly. I’m definitely not ready for that 🙂

I’ve solved the problem of posting daily by using Wordpress’ scheduling feature and by writing in advance. Normally I do it on the train, and that takes the stress out of it. You even get the benefit of having all posts appear at the same time of day, that is 8 pm local time in Austria, GMT-1, or minus two when daylight saving time applies in summer.

Of course it’s not daily any more in the sense that one day of my life is represented by the images of that one day. You’ve seen that with Ferrara: four days were spread over 27 posts, but that’s fine as well. It helps me close the gaps, and in the end you get better images, because I’m not forced to waste 60 images in four posts, while I’ll have to use hastily created fillers in between.

How do you feel about that? Does it make a difference to you at all?