June

It’s July already, and with it comes the sad realisation that from here on the days of 2013 are only getting shorter. Unless you’re reading this in Australia, in which case the days are getting longer and you’re heading towards summer. And Christmas. In summer. Seriously, do you guys realise how wrong that is?

June here on Creative Splurges has been yet another lopsided month. I had fully intended to keep the momentum from the end of May going into the new month, starting positively with a post a few days in, but that was followed by a big chunk of silence until the next, and final, post of the month at the tail end.

The first post was called Squirrel in the Garden, a ‘quickie’ post shot out of my window whilst writing another post, in a similar vein to Dave the Angry Bee and something that harks back to some old school Creative Splurges. Much like Dave the Angry Bee it also actually drew a few comments, which is currently, because of my sporadic posting, a bit of a rarity.

Unfortunately, things then fell apart a little bit. At the very tail end of May I knuckled down into editing a set of images from the Greenwood, but as I planned writing the accompanying post I realised the causality would be out a bit, as the techniques I used on the shoot were ones I’d learnt previously. So, with the Greenwood set edited I turned my hand to editing an earlier set: London Fashion Weekend.

Whilst editing the images, I realised why I haven’t been editing some of the bigger sets in my backlog. Part of it is the enormity of the number of shots, admittedly, but in reality there’s a bit of a Schrödinger’s Cat about it: if I don’t edit the pictures, then they can’t suck; they’ll always look as good as they did on the little three-inch screen on my camera (which always makes things look optimistically sharper than when I view them on a computer screen). So, I put off editing some of the posts which were more important to me so that they would never lose their potential. It doesn’t help that almost invariably the posts which in proudest of are the ones least warmly received, and sadly the same proved to be true of London Fashion Weekend, as it only garnered six likes and no comments.

The way I found to get around my reluctance to edit these sorts of sets was relatively simple; I just refrained from deleting any images, and instead went through and flagged the ones I wanted to share. That way it was a less destructive way of editing and so I was less reluctant to do it. It’s worked for London Fashion Weekend; hopefully it will work for some of the others in my backlog.

Halfway through editing the LFW images I buggered off on holiday for a week, further delaying the post, so it was finally posted near enough three weeks after the first post of the month, the aforementioned one with a squirrel in it.

Just before I published the fashion post, I tweaked about a bit with the look of the blog, clearing out the so-called sidebar to the right and moving everything to the bottom of the site, the logic being that it would look the page look less cluttered – plus there was little evidence the sidebar was being used. This follows on from another adjustment I made a month or so ago when I removed the ability to like or rate posts from the main front page. I’ve since moved a couple of the elements from the sidebar back again, as I felt it could potentially help with discovering new posts. Your feedback on the changes is always welcome.

There was only two posts in June. I guess because I actually spent a fair amount of the month working on photographs it feels like there should have been more. Despite this, the blog had 194 hits for the month, the lowest monthly total since 2011 but not by much. Meanwhile, The Daily Photo had 192 hits, the closest it’s gotten to Creative Splurges‘ like-for-like monthly total and a major improvement from the 61 hits it had in May. I did, admittedly, miss a day for the Daily Photo in June, caused by me queuing up posts whilst I was away and losing track of how many I’d prepared.

I have plans for next month, of course, as I usually do, but since some of them are ones I failed to achieve last month I’m going to keep them a little closer to my chest this month. To be honest, since this post is already two days late it’s not looking all that optimistic for this month so far. The Greenwood set alluded to earlier is top of my list, with at least one ‘thoughts’ post planned as well (but that was the same post I’d planned for last month), and I have my holiday photographs I’d like to process some of. And then there’s that whole backlog that is still there, over a dozen posts long…

I’ll get there eventually.

Thanks you, as ever, for reading this blog.
Rob