elsewhere…

I’ve been rather less wordy of late because I’ve jumped on to the photoblog bandwagon.

I thought I would give it a try as a wee project to pull together a collection of images of a certain kind that I find when I’m reviewing my stuff. It’s funny, because I don’t necessarily realise at the time of shooting that the images have that quality – but then they can jump out at me during the editing phase – sometimes even only on the second pass.

Anyway, I’ve recently had a lot more contact with groups of photographers who use a photoblog as a way of showing their images, so that they are posting at the most 1 per day, and it’s a one-shot-per-page setup so each image gets maximum attention. It seems to have an effect on the editing process when you”’re not looking to get everything processed and uploaded in one batch, so I was interested to try it out and see what it does for my workflow.

So far, I’m really enjoying using it as a showcase for all of that kind of picture (I really need to find a name that accurately describes just what that is, but see the blog about page for the best explanation I’ve found so far) and it’s nice to keep them separate from everything else – by pulling them together in a collection of their own I hope to make their ethereal quality come across much stronger than if they were left to drown in a sea of randomness.

What I’m struggling with, though, is thinking of something to write beside each image. Someone mentioned it in a comment on a recent post here that it’s possibly no coincidence that we (photographers, that is) might struggle to communicate what we see in a picture in words – because let’s face it, if we could say it so well in words we’d have pens in our hands rather than cameras! But I do really want to accompany each shot with a few words, I find orphan images with no text very unsettling because I always feel like there is something the photographer could tell you, not to tell you what to see and override your own reactions to the image but to help you understand what they were doing with it, or something about their feelings about it or how they made it. I suppose it’s a very personal thing. So the words to accompany each shot on the blog quite often end up as rambling nonsense, but hopefully I’ll develop that skill over time, and in the meantime, the pictures can mostly speak for themselves.