This blog – to continue or not?

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I haven’t updated this blog since February 2020. There are a number of reasons for this including: ill health; COVID restrictions etc. However, the most important is that I wasn’t sure that I even wanted to continue with the blog at all. One of the main reasons I started with it was because I thought it would encourage me to continue to take pictures. In that sense it was successful – maybe too much so. I found that I was “feeding” the blog i.e. I was taking pictures, not because they were particularly good, but rather because I had to meet my monthly quota.

So I’ve decided to give it one more try – this time focusing on quality rather than quantity. We’ll see how it goes.

New Portfolio – Black and White

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I’ve added a new portfolio: Black and White.

It turned out to be more difficult than I thought. It seems that I have a lot of black and white pictures.

They fall into a few distinct categories:

  • Digital pictures originally in color, but converted to black and white, often using Nik Silver Efex Pro 2. Rarely digital images taken in black and white. The bulk of my black and white images fall into this category
  • Color negatives and old prints, usually in color. Scanned and then converted to black and white, often using Nik Silver Efex Pro
  • Black and White negatives. Scanned.

I went through a large number of negatives to come up with 20 for the portfolio. It wasn’t always clear to me why I had selected some for conversion and not others. I fear that often if I had a color image that I didn’t really like I would see what it looked like converted to black and white.

Going forward I’m hoping to be more discriminating with the images I choose for conversion. I also hope to take more black and white negatives.

New Portfolio – Landscapes

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I’ve recently added a new portfolio: Landscapes. This one was much harder than the first three: Street; Portraits; and Abstract. The thing is that I don’t do a lot of street photography. Nor do I produce a lot of portraits. The same can be said of abstracts. So I didn’t have to go through too many pictures to find a few that I liked.

However, I live in the Hudson Valley and a lot of my pictures are landscapes taken while walking around – usually with the dog. So I had a lot to go through. I managed to find a few that I liked, but I was surprised to find how many I didn’t like. I don’t think I’ve invested enough time in landscape photography. Perhaps an investment in a new lens(ses) is in order? I’m thinking of a wide angle zoom. Also I think I have to take a tripod with me more often. I’ll also have to try to overcome my laziness and get up early in the morning to get better light.

We’ll see if anything improves.

New Portfolio – Abstract

by Posted in Abstracts, Site Changes Leave a comment
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We recently had a visit from one of my first cousins. I haven’t been good at staying in touch with my relatives in the UK and have lost touch with most of them. However, another cousin (sister to the one who came to visit) found me on Facebook and we exchanged a few messages. It turns out that my cousin Cliff has a son who lives on Long Island and that he, Cliff, would be visiting in June of this year. So we decided to get together. I think the last time I saw him (and then only briefly) was at my father’s funeral – 25 years ago. It’s probably closer to 40 years since we had any regular interaction.

We invited them (Cliff, his wife, his wife’s sister and his son) to come to the Lake House for lunch.

In conversation I discovered that Cliff’s wife also likes to take pictures and she’s particularly interested in more abstract compositions. I knew that I had a number like that and decided to single them out so that I could share them with her. Since I was doing this it seemed reasonable to create another portfolio (I hadn’t done one for a while) to contain them. I’ve called it “Abstract“.

A Few Site Changes

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Other than adding content I don’t often makes changes to this site. However, this month I’ve made one major change; one small change; and fixed a problem.

The major change was the addition of portfolios. I tend to include most of my pictures in the blog: good, mediocre; not so good etc. I felt the need to highlight some of the (to my mind) better pictures by theme. Hence the portfolios. I’m limiting the number of pictures in each portfolio to 20. So far I’ve only done two: Street and Portraits. I started off with these because they are my least favorite genres and I thought it would be easier to identify the better pictures because there weren’t too many to begin with. Hopefully I’ll be adding more.

So far I’ve given each of the pictures a ragged border. I’ve now decided to go with a simpler, plain black border, which also eliminates one step in my workflow. However, I have a number of pictures that I’ve already processed with the ragged border so they’ll still appear from time to time as I add them to the blog. All new pictures will have the plain black border. This was the minor change.

As for the fix. While working on my 2000th post I noticed that the monthly archives only display five posts, and that there was no way to move to subsequent posts (it only took me six years to figure this out). After a bit of research I came up with a solution using the Custom Post Limits plugin, which in its description states: “By default, WordPress provides a single configuration setting to control how many posts should be listed in each section of your blog. This value applies for the front page listing, author listings, archive listings, category listings, tag listings, and search results. This plugin allows you to override that value for each of those different sections.”. It seems to do the job.