How in the name of Greg and his calendar is it October already? We’re three quarters of the way through 2014 already and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. If I have any hopes for 2015 it’s that it takes a more leisurely pace compared to 2014. Especially on weekends.
September has been a pretty good month, with a nice long holiday being followed by being kept active at work, which has made a nice change after a relatively quiet summer. Something you might have picked up on is that I am now keeping to a posting schedule. For a long time I’ve resisted having a fixed posting schedule for this blog out of concerns that it would impact on the quality of the posts by causing me to fixate on deadlines over quality. Despite this, in July I started trying to stick to a routine for posts. I didn’t publicly announce it in case I completely failed in my objective, but just decided to myself that from that point onwards, I would aim to release a post every Tuesday. Why Tuesday? It just felt right, probably because it wasn’t a Monday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. The only exception would be my monthly reviews, which still get released on the first day of the following month. I started off reasonably well; the three posts in July were on three consecutive Tuesdays, and August’s first was right on time too. It was beginning to get to the point when I was feeling confident in announcing my schedule – and then I missed a week. I picked it up the next week and kept it going through August but it put me off mentioning the schedule for a while.
September started off pretty well, because I wasn’t in the country. Both August’s monthly review and the first post of the month – Instagram #18 – were written the previous week before I left the UK. One of the advantages of a posting schedule is you can just sit down and write and know exactly when things will be published. Instagram #18 itself is largely in line with most of my previous 17 Instagram posts but the one at the left is one of my favourite Instagram shots I’ve taken in a while, shot in a great antiques shop in a town near me. I really should get down there with my DSLR at some point.
That is about where my organisation of the month ran out. Although I was away for the first two weeks of September, I didn’t manage to complete the second week’s post before we went away. Fortunately I found a spot of decent wifi in a hotel in Switzerland to complete and queue up Lego Ecto-1. The slight haste at which it was constructed was why I ended up using the gallery format that I don’t often make use of. Even so, I’m really pleased with the quality of the images I got. The post also marked the first set of photographs I’ve published that were edited in Lightroom following my recent switch. Maybe it’s my imagination but I seem to be getting better results from the newer application.
I got home from my holiday with a cold and was laid out on the Sunday. Back to my day job on Monday, I’d left myself precious little time to prepare a post to keep to my self-imposed Tuesday posting deadlines. It wasn’t until Monday evening when it occurred to me as to what I should do for the post. The result was A Taste of Europe, a new type of post I’ve not really done before: knowing that the 1,000 or so images I took on my break would end up taking up several posts and take a bit of time to edit, I skimmed through and selected the twenty or so ones that caught my eye, and edited those into a medley post. I’m actually really, really pleased with the quality of the images in that set. The 1,000 images I took over two weeks away was pretty low by my usual standards, but I’m happy it was because I was a lot more considered in my shooting.
The following weekend I was lucky enough to return to London Fashion Weekend for a third time. Slightly foolishly I didn’t plan a post for the following Tuesday, harbouring some sort of hope I’d be able to turn around a post in a couple of days. Yeah, right. It soon became apparent this wasn’t going to happen, and I was yet again without a post and with very little time to prepare it. Fortunately on the way home from the fashion show I’d taken a handful of images that fit perfectly into my definition of random gems, and that led to a hurriedly assembled Random Gems III. I think I may have put a couple too many images in the post to pad it out, but I’m pleased with the majority of the photographs in it.
Which brings me to yesterday. After posting Random Gems III I knuckled down to edit the 1,800 frames I shot at London Fashion Weekend, aiming to get them posted yesterday. I got pretty close, but was still writing the post when my time ran out last night. I’m a bit disappointed that I missed a post again after somehow making it through September otherwise unscathed, but the plan has otherwise been going so well it’s just a little dip in the road. I’m planning ahead my posts whenever I can so I know what I’m doing.
So what for next month? My images from London Fashion Weekend will be along next week, and then after that I’ll be turning my attention to my images from my holiday. I’ve not got any shooting planned but something will probably turn up in that way it tends to in my life.
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Rob
Creative Splurges 