This time last month I was sitting here, analysing the underlying reasons why, for the first time since I started this blog, I’d had a postless month. There a variety of reasons why it happened, and one of the main ones was that I hadn’t written anything. Keen followers of this blog will have noticed that October seemed to start off pretty similarly. We were almost three weeks into the month before I got a post out of the door. There’s a good reason for that too.
The month started with a man installing a new kitchen in our flat (renting perk: not having to pay for a new kitchen) and for the time the work was happening I stayed home to keep an eye on the cats and help out if needed. Confined to my study, I had over a week sitting at my computer, with nothing else to distract me. To make the most of the time, I decided to concentrate on editing photos rather than writing. By the time our kitchen returned to habitability, I’d edited over 2,500 images from various sets, including some from the big batches that I’d long been avoiding. Pretty good progress, but not a word had been written, and that’s what makes posts. By October 18th I’d finally managed to assemble some words in an appreciable order to warrant publishing a post.
Return to London Fashion Weekend was a bit of an unexpected post, in the sense that I never really expected to return to a London Fashion Weekend show so soon, if at all. As far as trips go it was refreshing to not be worrying so much about missing shots. On my first trip there earlier this year I was so concerned with not wasting the opportunity to shoot there I played things a bit safe. This time I didn’t really care too much about losing the shot, and perhaps got a few more interesting images as a result. That said, the trip took place in mid September and I hadn’t been out shooting in a while, so I wasn’t feeling particularly creative when taking pictures, so the images could perhaps be considered ‘unimaginative’ rather than ‘safe’.
Return to London Fashion Weekend also marked the 200th post on Creative Splurges. After attempting and failing to make a big deal out of this blog’s 100th post I was content to let the milestone slip by quietly.
The post was shot mostly with my work-a-day 18-135mm lens. Whilst editing I was getting a bit disappointed with the quality of some of the imagery I was getting. About the same time an offer came my way on select Canon lenses, and I found myself unable to resist, so I’ve now added a Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L IS to my collection, ultimately replacing my 18-135 as my main daily lens. I haven’t got round to updating my kit page yet so you’ll have to take my word for it for now.
The first use for this new lens was to get some decent images of the first display of my work anywhere ever, in the foyer of the Greenwood Theatre. It’s still a little weird knowing some of my photographs are up on some walls for loads of people to see, but as there’s not been a huge amount of formal feedback I normally forget they’re there. I’ll definitely remember if it leads to any of the groups that use the theatre asking me to shoot any of their shows (there was the suggestion one of the groups was interested, but I’ve not heard anything yet). I’ve left some of my business cards over there should anyone express an interest.
I am also aware of the photoception of taking pictures of pictures, but I wanted to let you have a look at my one success so far.
My next and final post of the month was one I’d been saving part of up for a while. Food, Glorious Food contained some shots from months previous, and some from only a week or two previously. Caught up in my massive edit at the start of the month, I finally completed it a week ago. It contains some of my favourite images for some time, especially the chocolate box on the left, the bread and cupcake shot at the top of this post, and the bowl of chips. It was pretty popular with you too, getting 14 likes compared to the previous posts’ 5 and 4 respectively.
Unfortunately that was the last of the posts for the month. I almost squeezed another one out before having to change the page on my calendar, but yesterday being a particularly epic day of riding around London in an Ectomobile doing Ghostbusting meant I couldn’t quite finish it in time. It’s about 75% done, honest, so you should see it in the very near future.
Over on the Daily Photo I again managed to miss a day somehow. I think I just plum forgot, but these days, after 670 posts, it seems to bother me far less, and I didn’t bother backdating a post to fill the gap.
Statistically speaking, the Daily Photo had 115 hits in October, about on average for the year. Creative Splurges had 431, noticeably higher than the last couple of months and the third-highest monthly total of the year. Both blogs continue to add followers intermittently.
So what for next month? Thanks to the start of October I have two backlog queues currently, one of images to edit, and one of edited images to write up. I’ll be working on keeping both moving when I can. I’ve not got much on the shooting docket, with the exception of some rugby in a week or so. My last rugby trip, back in February, resulted in a batch of disappointing images I’m not sure I’ll ever release, apart from maybe as a ‘here’s how not to do this’ post, which leaves me in two minds about going. We’ll see.
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Rob
Creative Splurges 
