Jan 15

Jan 15 Happy New Year, Plus Two Weeks!

I had this great plan to start the new year with a fresh blogging schedule, and a renewed energy. Of course that didn’t happen. It’s two weeks later and I’m only getting around to writing my “new year” post now. Like many a New Year’s resolutions, they crashed and burned on day two! But now that I have a moment, let me update you on a few things that have been happening, and some plans for the next little while.

Work is work

The reason it’s taken me so long to post over the last little while, is that I’ve been really busy with work. I had some graphics projects that had begun before Christmas, that were still running, and so they are still ongoing. As the deadline for finishing approaches, the work has been getting more and more intense, so I haven’t even had a minute to even stop and reflect. Until now!

I’ve been working on some interesting projects, most of which I can’t talk about, but when or if I can, I’ll let you know. I did have some photography related work too, which was also interesting, but unfortunately also under NDA. It’s actually the busiest January I’ve had in a while, so I’m not complaining.

A belated look back at last year.

Another plan I had which failed miserably, was to do a retrospective of my photos from 2023. I had actually started doing this in December, but again…work. I have been quite disappointed with my photography lately, for various reasons. I have been feeling lately that my results are not nearly as good as they used to be, and this kind of becomes a “doom loop” of sorts, as you are then not motivated to take as many photos.

I had thought that, because of this I hadn’t taken that many photos last year, or that they weren’t very good, but when I actually went back and looked, I realised I actually had shot lots. And they weren’t as bad as I thought either. I just didn’t really do anything with them. I had actually travelled quite a bit in 2023, visiting as diverse places as Copenhagen and Stockholm, to New York, London and Brussels.

In all of these, I had gathered some descent images, but I never did my usual photo essays, and looking back I realise that I haven’t shared quite a bit. I also realised that I had shot far more than I thought. So here is a random selection of some of the phots that I took last year. I will try and do a proper Photo Diary post to go with more of these soon (Yeah, right, Thomas!) but in the mean time, here is a selection.

New Videos, and New Plans

Going forward, I have a couple of topics that I want to make videos for in the near future. One is a little fun subject, that’s kind of only tangentially related to photography, but it should be interesting and mildly entertaining. The other is some iPhone 15 coverage.

I had been using an iPhone XR for the last few years, and it’s served me reasonably well, but it was slowly dying. IOS 17 didn’t help much in that department. I finally made the leap and went for an iPhone 15 Pro Max. To say there was a difference is something of an understatement. I may do a review at some point, but I also want to cover the photography aspect of it. There’s been lots of talk of the ProRes log option for shooting video on the phone, but not as much discussions around the photography side of things, and I have a few observations and tips. I’m trying to collate these into a coherent article/video, so more on that in the near future.

I do want to make more videos too. I want to shake my YouTube channel up a bit, and get away from the straight up tutorials, and back to more out and about type videos. I may move it away from being strictly about photography, to being more about creativity, but we’ll see. YouTube is a strange beast. It doesn’t like you changing things. I had some momentum with the channel towards the end of last year, but I lost that over December as I didn’t have the time to make anything new. Part of me wants to start a whole new YouTube channel and start from scratch with a more coherent plan, but that’s a whole other can of worms.

Website plans or lack thereof

I had mentioned a long time ago that I had planned to overhaul this website substantially. Well, that didn’t happen, obviously. I remember Peter McKinnon did a video a few years ago where he cautioned against announcing future plans when they had a chance of not happening, and it was very good advice. I wish I’d listened to it. In the end, it was too much trouble trying to get my data out of my Squarespace website, because it’s basically too big. I have thousands of posts on here and it’s a massive pain to move that to Wordpress, especially keeping the layout, images etc intact. Instead I made some visual tweaks to the home page and that was that.

I’m not hugely happy with the situation, and Squarespace is becoming less and less blog-friendly. It’s really pushing the commerce side of things, which is also a pain because you can’t really use any of than in the EU either. I do still want to get my data off here, if only for safety purposes, but thats a project for another day.

It’s a real shame in one way, because I actually like Squarespace, and it’s great in many ways, but it’s becoming less and less suitable. There’s been a lot of minor things that they’ve changed over the past year that have made this platform less user friendly. You really don’t appreciate the advantage of having one contained platform though, until you start trying to source a good Wordpress hosting solution. There’s soooo many options, and it’s a bit of a head wreck. I want to try and keep it to an EU or Irish provider too, to make it easier for accounting purposes, but that’s a Hughe can of worms too.

So that’s all why I’ll be sticking with Squarespace for now. But keep an eye on the blog, as that may be changing if I can figure something out. I’m still open to the idea of starting over with a whole new blog and just keep this here as an archive. But again, no announcements.

(Have you learned nothing, Thomas ???)

Looking forward

So with that out of the way, I’m heading into the new year with a little uncertainty but a lot of hope. I feel better about things going forward for this site and the content. I will be shaking things up a bit, but as I’ve learned the hard way, I won’t be making any announcements I can’t keep.

I hope to continue to bring you my own take on things in the way you’ve come to know, but perhaps those “things” will be a little different than I’ve done before. Anyway, either way, happy new year. Even if it is two weeks late!

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