making this up as I go

I was probably fairly certain that I'd last at least a year when I started this; it came along after a few months of near-obsessive sparkle-happy-sun-walk-weekend-morning picture-taking following my most recent upgrade to an half-way-decent camera. I'd been taking pictures most days and uploading the decent ones regularly to Flickr (which I initially signed up to just to let other people see the pictures I took at a mate's thirtieth) but hadn't really started writing anything much to go with them apart from the odd description here and there. I had been thinking about dusting off my primitive capacity to bodge together javascript and html to create a vaguely bloggish stream of selected pictures when fellow-365-today-er TFP handed me a post-it on which was written the blip URL.

As the blurb says I'd briefly attempted to write some bloglike crap regularlishly a while back on h2g2 but quickly gave up, partly due to other committments such as uni work, uni exams, finding a job, doing a job and then just when it had all settled down the uni got round to removing my access to the computer labs a good seven months after I graduated. It was a little while before I got a computer of my own at home and the flow had been broken; I'd almost stopped taking pictures at the same time due to film processing costs and slightly later because my beloved Praktica BX20 had developed a limp on the shutter and was mis-exposing. I'd been as keen a photographer as possible since the age of 12ish but had unfortunately never gone down the home-darkroom route (possibly due to single-mindedly switching the area of primary interest to the guitar) which might have been handy during the skint years when four or five pounds per film for purchase and processing was too much to permit more than the occasional spree of camera-usage here and there on special occasions. Luckily digital cameras became affordable-ish, then affordable, then affordable and half-decent then finally cheapish and good.

Mayhap it was a blessing that my first (shitey shite-shite) digital camera was thieved close enough to my birthday three years ago to warrant the purchase of a significantly more advanced replacement. The s5000 was sufficiently manual-settings-adjustable to get me back into the swing of photographic things and felt more like a proper camera. Last spring I wangled another birthday-upgrade by passing the s5000 on to my dad and getting enough overtime to warrant a sneaky jump from the initial target camera up to the s9500. Which broke a couple of months later, preventing me from using any manual settings. Thus was the crappyphonecam period begun in September last year when I sent the big camera away for repair which took three agonising and ranty weeks. I would probably have sent it away much sooner had I not been blipping steadily by then and there always seemed to be something coming up in the next couple of weeks for which I would have preferred to have a camera which at least pretended to have a lens made of glass rather than plastic. Still, without the crappyphonecam period there would have been less rants, less yearning to be able to play about with manual settings, less saving-up-shots and generally less experimentation upon the camera's return which really highlighted its limitations and led me to eventually upgrade again in January, this time back up to SLR level. Whenever I look in my camera bag and worry that it's getting a bit heavy I simply have to look at the horrible noise, JPEG artefaction and lack of crispiness in my early blips to reassure me that it was the right thing to do.


This really has been immense fun; I've discovered lots of interesting new nooks around the place, re-learnt a lot of what I'd forgotten about takey-pictures and started speaking at and conversing with people more, albeit in writing end electrically. Years of wandering around glowering at the pavement and into corners has finally come in handy. And, despite the fact that one shouldn't really start a sentence with and, people have looked at and read the things which makes it all worthwhile. Thank you all very much for so doing.

With that and all the nice pretty pictures too I think I shall most definitely keep this up.



I shall close with some stats seeing as the automation of collation thereof is my day job. I was mostly attempting to see if there was a definite increase in the daily word count and number of daily shutterflaps but counted the comments and views per picture too.
155 blips were taken with the Fujifilm "fine"pix s9500, bracketing the 24 taken with the Nokia 6230 (crappyphonecam) during the s9500-repair-crappyphonecam period last September. Luckily I'd upgraded phones by the time the s9500 was sold in January so the four-day period between sale and delivery of the Nikon D80 was slightly less unpleasant using the almost-tolerable-as-pocket-camera (it was used voluntarily for two other blips) Sony Ericsson K800 (although it drowned on May 31st in my pocket during a walk home in that really heavy rain). Since almost exactly six months ago all 179 post-upgrade blips have been taken with the D80 apart from one when I left the battery in the charger at home one day. I hope the D80 won't need to go away for repair until I can upgrade my phone again at the end of the year as the 6230 (whilst far better than the K800 as a telephone) sucks ass at taking pictures.
I haven't managed to automate a means to count the number of links each day and probably won't bother doing it by hand. The folder in which I keep cropped/edited versions of master images is slightly polluted by pictures for other uses so isn't a reliable indicator of the volume of shortlisted-images-per-day between which I usually have to umm and ahh when the picture to pick isn't obvious. I expect it's vaguely proportional to the number of exposures although some of the high-volume days just feature masses of multiple pics of insects where I've been trying to get them in focus and non-shakey. One day soon I'll have to go through and remove the doesn't-work copies to save a little bit of space and put off the purchase of a second external drive for a week or two. I also wanted to produce some kind of focal length/frequency graph but haven't finished it yet; it'll still come in handy if I ever have to choose a least-frequently-used lens to sell in order to upgrade.
Three posts lacked a title, probably because I couldn't think of one and forgot to add it after typing the main text and only two titles were repeated: "spoon" on the first blip of 25/07/2007 and 01/05/2007 when it described me for forgetting my camera battery. "Sticks and stones" also turned up twice on 26/08/2006 and 28/04/2007.
Surprisingly I only used "oaf" or a derivative 22 times, "codger" and assoc. words 14 times and "muffin(s)" thirty-thricely.

I'll add a couple of links in a moment too...
There may be a theme...