Mud flats

Goodness, how I've agonised about which shot to blip for the 29th! Well rested after the saga of the work efforts (though I woke first at 7.00 am from force of recent habit and messed around for a bit before hitting the pillow again and finally surfacing at noon or thereabouts), I took it easy, feeling as if a tremendous weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Actually, I was too laid back by far, since it was 7.00 pm before I had a blip panic attack and 8.00 before I did anything about it. I had a boring fallback in the bag before hopping in the car and taking the short trip from home down to the seafront at Clontarf to see what I could see.

One hour and 100 photos later I got back, had a bite to eat, phone-chatted with a mate I'd given short shrift to yesterday when he phoned to enquire about calling in for coffee and a toilet break, and only began the process of photo transfer to my iMac at 10.00, after which it was (a) preliminary weeding out to arrive at a manageable selection, (b) basic adjustments to the keepers such as straightening, tweaking of levels, cropping and so on, (c) round 2 of elimination to get things down to 25 possibles, (d) side-by-side comparisons between similar images to decide picks, (e) painstaking analysis of good and bad points of each remaining option, leading to a final shortlist of three finalists, (f) to-and-fro agonising about which one to plump for as blipworthy, and (g) eventual decision to go with this one (though always with the proviso that the edit possibility remains live for another while if I feel like changing my mind -- which I did, of course, with Flick's encouragement).

The entire process from transfer to iMac to writing this text took four hours, right up until 2.00 am tomorrow -- so, all in all, not that much different from the pressure of the past few days with real work.