10 Weeks and 5 Days

It has been 10 weeks and 5 days since my last post. Writing this post feels a bit odd. I feel like I am returning to some regularly occurring meeting where everyone else has been attending, and dutifully marking me absent. With my return I feel like I need to offer up an explanation for my absence.

During my absence, I was giving serious thought to what my relationship should be with this blog. Should I just ignore it? If I do not ignore it, what should I do differently? What is keeping me from updating it? My thoughts varied considerably, but I have managed to consolidate things down into a nice summary.

I am too busy to maintain a blog. This was where I was just too busy with other things in my life to spend any quality time here, with no expectation that more time would become available. Some examples: the demands of my job, the holiday season and my love of college football.

I am having a hard time finding exciting content to blog about. There were points over the past 10 weeks where I was ready to spend some time on this blog, but my ideas for content were either altogether absent, or just unexciting to me. Was each winter really only going to bring yet another series of photos of Hermit Thrush and Ring-necked Duck?

To be a better photographer, I need to do some things differently. I enjoy my self-paced improvement of photographic knowledge. As I became a better photographer, I recognized that I needed to change how I did certain things. Towards that end, I made some significant changes to my "digital darkroom" - the process I use to move a photo from my camera to some end point such as a print, Flickr or this blog. This included a switch to shooting RAWs instead of JPGs, the purchase of Adobe Lightroom (and the associated self-education that comes with new software), changes to how I organize and store my photos, and a new backup philosophy (which is really still evolving). I wanted more control over certain areas within that process, and to get that control, I had to make some radical changes to other parts of the process.

I need to accept the amount of time I have for, and the priority I can give to, the hobbies that I enjoy. This was where I came to grips with the amount of time I can really commit to my hobbies. This blog represents just one final step in a series of steps that begins with me making time to go outside to take pictures. In between the trip outside and this blog is that "digital darkroom" thing I mentioned above. And interfering with all of these are the usual real-life things that you would expect. The most important of my varied hobbies is the actual time outside. The photographs and blog posts are just side-effects from that core activity.

So here I am, 10 weeks and 5 days later, ready to resurrect my blogging presence. I expect to generate a new post about once a week. Same as before, the content will be focused on the outside, with a preference for the avian.