While there are a lot of negative aspects to this whole Covid-19 quarantine and there are a lot of unknowns of what happens next that can seem scary and depressing, I have to admit there is at least one silver lining for me. This quarantine has given me a real opportunity to finally dedicate some time to my website. The most obvious change is that I’m finally committing to the blog aspect of the site like I had hoped to for a very long time. Thus far I’ve been able to string together nearly 3 weeks of daily posts and inertia has certainly helped keep me focused on continuing that trend.
However, I also feel like much of this has been completely random, spaghetti-thrown-at-the-walls kind of stuff. I don’t feel like there’s a coherence to my posts. I crave adding some measure of structure that will keep me organized and provide a better flow to the site.
One idea I’m pondering is assigning days of the week to a couple of my established series. Yesterday’s Equipment Journal post, for instance, seems like a good starting point. One of the reasons that I wanted to change that series from “Camera Non-Review” (besides the clumsy name) was to allow me to include more potentially reviewable subjects beyond cameras. While I have a full menagerie of cameras to review, there are plenty of other pieces of gear that I can review, too. Lenses, flashes, film, post processing software, tripods, printers, etc. all can fit into the Equipment Journal series. I have enough stuff for years of weekly Equipment Journal posts. That also means that I probably need to dedicate at least one other post to my full blown case of G.A.S. (gear acquisition syndrome), LOL.
The One Image, One Story series is one that would be easy to continue on a weekly basis, too. I have a lot of pictures and a lot of them have stories to go with them. Sometimes they’re humorous anecdotes about how a given picture was made. Sometimes they’re thoughts on the aesthetics of the picture and what I like or don’t like. Sometimes I get almost philosophical when posting about a given shot. That’s another series that would be easy to maintain on a weekly basis.
So there are at least two series that can fill up 2/7ths of my weekly posts. What about the rest? How do I add more structure to the blog? I guess that’s something that will reveal itself as I go along. For now, I’ll just hope the journey isn’t too haphazard for readers.
The composition of this shot is all about structure for me. The strongest vertical elements are associated with the old steel tile grain elevator in Venango, Nebraska. In most towns on the great plains, the grain elevator was and is the tallest structure in town and they’re symbolic of the agricultural heart of the region. The strongest horizontal lines are associated with the parked grain cars on the siding at the elevator. They’re symbolic of ties to the world that the railroads provided these towns. Everything works together cohesively. Finding that same sense of structure in my blog writings is proving more illusive.
Pentax K-5, Pentax DA-L 18-55mm f3.5-5.6
2 Comments
One of the great things about a blog is that it *can* be haphazard, at least a little. That’s what makes it human.
What I’ve done is create several post types that make up the core of my blog. The camera review, the one-roll film review, the photo walk, the road trip, the historic place/building story. There are probably a couple more I’m forgetting. My blog is mostly those things. But when I want to write something else I just do, because it’s a personal blog at the end of the day and most of my audience will tolerate a dalliance knowing I’ll be back with the stuff they care about soon.
I’ve always really liked the flow of your blog. Do you have a plan in place for how the core type posts appear? E.g. do you do a camera review, follow it with a one-roll film review, followed by a road trip, etc. and just fill in with the non-core stuff when they pop up? Or do you just tend to roll with what is on your mind on a given day?