I should probably start off this month’s review with an apology. It’s not been a good month here, with only three posts of moderate quality, none of which were as popular as February’s monthly review, which is for reasons I will never be able to fathom one of the most popular posts ever on this site.
My head has not really been in the right gear for a lot of the month; I’ve found myself unable to concentrate for any length of time and given the massive pile of images I have to edit and post not much is getting achieved. Although I’ve only been on a few shoots this month one of them was another theatre show so that backlog is no shorter than it was a month ago (on the bright side, I achieved my goal of getting an image out quickly enough for the theatre to use it on a promo post).
Being unable to concentrate, it’s been difficult to pick out sets of images to start working on. As a result, this month’s posts have been a bit of an eclectic set, from a theatre show to a cloudy pre-Olympic London via a Christmas market, and… nothing in between, because those were the only three posts in the month.
Fame was posted only two months after I shot it; not a great turnaround but it could’ve been far worse. This was a set that I wasn’t feeling too confident about when I shot it, but once I’d been through them I was really quite pleased with the images. It was good to get a nice selection of behind-the-scenes imagery from the theatre too, which ended up being some of my favourites from the set. It was pretty warmly received by Catherine and the Greenwood; one of the shots is currently the cover photo on its Facebook page, which always feels good. I returned to the Greenwood Theatre in March for a dance show; those images will be along at some point.
The second post of the month was Winter Wonderland, a set of images a month older than those in Fame. This was one of those sets where the photographs I had taken were not very representative of the trip, so it was never that high up my priorities to work on what was quite a small set. But, in my current state of working on whatever I feel like at the time, sitting in a cold snap I felt inclined to write up a post about a winter market whilst the temperatures were still dropping below freezing. It’s not a bad set, but I can’t help but think of the things I didn’t photograph because of constraints of time or cold, like some incredible chocolate sculptures and various other food and craft stuffs. Perhaps I’ll have to go back there next year and take a bit more time about it.
The final post of the month – posted on the last day of the month because I might as well use up all of the days – was Cloudy London, an even older set that predates the Olympics and was taken on the same day as London at Night (Part IV) and In the Skatepark at Midnight. Clearly, the latter two were better and finished far quicker than the comparatively mundane former post. Cloudy London also suffered from a similar problem as Winter Wonderland; this time a lot of the shots simply didn’t turn out, and I was disappointed that I only got a few workable ones from the steampunk fair when there was so much more to be seen. This was just before the Olympics, when I was mired in a creative funk that was affecting my photography pretty badly, so I can’t really blame it, and when the Olympics came along to get me back into things this post was swept out of the way a bit. I was still pleased with the finished images, and had always been intending to post it, but as the quality wasn’t quite up to much the post always seemed to get bumped back in favour of stronger material.
Despite my low post count on Creative Splurges, The Daily Photo has been keeping up with its remit superbly. It has proven to be a bit of a drain, however. I like to keep things shuffled and not release images before the corresponding post has been published on Creative Splurges, and keeping posts deliberately disorganised has been difficult with a rapidly shrinking pool of images to work from. As soon as I post something onto Creative Splurges then it frees up a bunch of images to the Daily Photo, but until then the backlog problem on the main blog is beginning to affect the spinoff blog.
Stats-wise, The Daily Photo only had 90 hits for the month, the lowest in recorded history and continuing a steady decline that’s been happening since Christmas. However, the blog now has over 150 followers so it’s growing pretty nicely, and I’d always set it up to make it easier to view images, and hopefully encourage people to Creative Splurges itself, rather than tout for hits of its own. ‘Like’-wise, which is a far better metric to measure response to blogs as WordPress have nicely made it easy to read people’s blogs – especially with posts as short as those on the Daily Photo – without actually visiting their sites and registering a hit, quite a few images have had a decent reaction; the least popular garnered three likes, the most eighteen.
Creative Splurges has continued on a similar decline, with 258 hits in March. That said, this is not a bad figure given the low post count, so I’m not too concerned about it just yet. Creative Splurges has also courted a few new followers this month; the total is now 320.
Looking forwards to next month, what do we see? I do have one trip planned, but it is right at the end of the month and so not likely to show up in April. I still have a lot of photographs to work my way through, but some of these sets are large and need a fair amount of editing before they’ll be ready. Even then, I am still struggling on the writing front, meaning it’s taking longer than it should to publish posts. Hopefully I’ll be able to combat my lack of concentration next month, but we’ll see. Any tips would be very welcome!
Thank you for reading.
Rob
Creative Splurges 