Gingerjo’s Blog

At last, our patience (and confidence in dabs.com) is rewarded.  Our Wii is here!

It’s only taken two months.

Just because I’m not busy or overstretched enough already I’ve recently chosen to enrol on a digital photography course at the OU.  I’ve attempted the first assignment tonight - spending an hour exploring the images on www.flickr.com looking for images that I find interesting for some reason. 

What an extraordinary website! I’m amazed by the beauty of many of the images - there are some truly extraordinary photographers in this world capturing the essence of their subjects.  It’s not hard to see why people from some cultures believe that photography captures a little of their soul - a good photograph certainly appears to. 

I’m now meant to think about why I’m attracted by the images I’ve bookmarked in flickr and consider the ways each image might be improved.  To be honest I’m not sure I’m learning a great deal about photography in this exercise, but I’m certainly discovering what types of photography I’m interested in.  I seem to have a strong preference for natural images - landscapes, seascapes, animals and plants, very close up (macro) images of flowers and insects and the like.  I also seem to like industrial landscapes - powerstations and windfarms, as well as entertainment landscapes - fairgrounds, cinemas, etc.  What I don’t seem to like are photos of people - except close-ups of wizened, wrinkled, interesting faces.  Faces with character and honesty I suppose.  Most of the photos of people on flickr seem to be contrived in some way.  I might recognise them as technically excellent images, but they don’t interest me at all.

This is the reason I’ve been feeling pressured by the blog-monster - I haven’t posted for two weeks.  During the first week we were DIYing (putting up shelves to be precise). This may sound daft - you can’t possibly DIY 24/7. However, my Dad came up from Wales to put up the shelves for us and because this is the world’s most higgledy-piggledy house every shelf had to be precisely measured and hand-cut to fit the walls that curve off at random angles.  He also plained all the doors so that they actually shut - guests can even lock the bathroom door now should they so choose!  Obviously it would be incredibly rude to say thanks for all your hard work all day Dad - now you’ve stopped for a chat and a rest I’m off to play on my computer for a couple of hours, feel free to watch the telly. 

I don’t know what we’d have done if Dad couldn’t have done this for us - there’s no cupboard space in the house and we were already fighting about tripping over each other’s clutter before Mark decided to buy a new drumkit.  Since we have an abundance of alcoves the obvious answer was shelves, lots and lots of shelves.  Unfortunately there isn’t a straight wall in the house and we knew it would require a highly skilled carpenter and joiner to makes shelves to fit.  Fortunately, I happen to know an expert in the field, my Dad, who did a seven year apprenticeship in the days when tradesmen were properly trained to do the job and took pride in the quality of their workmanship.  Our shelves are a work of art (not to mention geometry) so thanks Dad - we could never have done this by ourselves and I doubt if we could have afforded a suitably skilled carpenter even if we could have found one.

The second week we went to Norfolk on holiday and I was completely cut off from the digital world.  All about that in further posts/webpages (when I get around to it).

THANKS AGAIN DAD!!

Moreover, the gardening analogy can be extended - part of the pleasure of gardening is not just enjoying the fruits of your own labour, but appreciating the efforts of other gardeners too.  Bloggers are really supposed to go read other folk’s blogs and comment, leave trackbacks and generally interact.  I’m afraid I don’t do this at all - I just haven’t had chance to spend any time searching the blogosphere for bloggers with mutual interests.  Part of the problem is that I’m not 100% sure what my interests are. There’s also the problem that when you search for blogs (using technorati or google blogsearch) a lot of what you get seems to be rss feeds from news sites.  I want to read about people not corporations! 

Continuing with the gardening analogy -

I’ve also found that if you go away for a few weeks the whole garden gets out of hand leaving you demoralised and not sure where to start with the weeding/mowing/pruning/etc. I haven’t posted a blog for over two weeks now and I’ve definitely lost the momentum.  I’m finding it quite hard to know where to start, how much depth to go in to about what I’ve been up to and feeling somewhat pressured by the blog-monster who’s now DEMANDING text to munch on.

Initially I thought I’d give blogging a go because it’s being used by an increasing number of companies as a marketing tool and I thought it would only be a matter of time before the university I work for decided it wanted one/some.  Since there was a high probability that I would be asked to help the chosen blogger/s to get it going I figured I should probably know what the hell all the fuss was about and how the blogosphere worked.

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