the joy of blips

I don't know what came first. It might have been a latent desire take a few new photographs again that prompted me to write about it a few weeks ago, or actually thinking about and writing about my photographic history set off the desire to take some photographs again. Either way, I charged the batteries one morning, then picked up my camera bag and took it with us when we went out for a walk last weekend.

Poor Gwynnik (my dog) recognised me carrying the camera bag and I swear I saw her looking a bit disappointed. Maybe she remembered that if I want to stop to point the camera at things, this will necessitate a large number of temporary halts and interruptions to proceedings, and that the said interruptions are not either of the preferred types of smelling stuff or chasing a ball that she only just went and brought back because he's thrown it away AGAIN.

Anyway, she's a dog and doesn't have much choice in the matter, so I did stop occasionally to take some photographs, but we did also play some ball and stop to smell things. Well, she stopped to smell things. A lot. But again, she's a dog.

I was going to write this whole post about the difficulty of getting my photos processed into JPG format from the RAW type files I have the camera save them as, but it boils down to "I've pretty much changed to Linux, I tried to use RAWTherapee and it wouldn't open the drive at all, just froze up, so I tried Darktable, it did open the drive but holy hell, what language are they they speaking?, and where are the things I need, and what do they call it in scientist-doing-a-definition-on-Wikipedia-entry speak to do my thing and, oh sod this, I'm booting up my Windows partition and using Lightroom today."

I knew there would be a learning curve, but it turns out for Darktable (sorry, darktable - no capital letters makes the interface harder as well) it's a cliff, because they use strictly the correct language for everything. Which, yeah, it's probably correct terminology, but does anyone (relatively) normal like me know what it all means in plain English please?

I'll have to watch a few videos, probably many many times. And for RAWTherapee, it'll be surfing forums for a few days, trying to find a solution to my particular problem of it not seeing any external drives, and my brain won't deal with that today. Or possibly on any other day. We'll see.

No doubt others will be on at me not putting enough effort in to understand them and they'll swear it's all perfectly good once you put that effort in, and yes, I'll be guilty of that. I'm not thick, just of a woefully limited attention span. 'Lacks effort' and 'obviously bright but easily distracted' littered my school reports.

Once I had reverted to being in the comfort of Adobe Lightroom (yes, lots of bad stuff with Adobe, and I'll get rid when I am comfortable with any open source alternative that works for me), and processed a few files, I was left with a question.

What am I doing with the resulting pictures now?

I don't have a Flikr account any more, nor a specialist photo blog with a few thousand followers. I do have the skeleton remains of a shop on Pixels (an offshoot of Fine Art America). Do I want to try to sell any pictures any more? Or am I just happy with taking a picture and... I don't know what after that.

Which is probably were I was mentally when I shut everything down before.

But I posted one on my Mastodon account and was pleased to hear the familiar blip notification noise immediately as Likes started happening. I liked that sound. I know we've been conditioned over the years into responding to the pings and bleeps and buzzes of notifications with that fleeting and ephemeral feeling of pleasure, but I guess if that's all my photos are doing now - and it's a matching moment of pleasure of seeing it that is happening somewhere else in the world as a result of my choosing to post them - then that's quite a lot better than doing nothing with them and keeping them to myself, filed away (probably haphazardly) on a storage drive.

The next thing to figure out is whether to start a separate photography blog, as I have done before or, considering the occasional nature of my photography now, just post a few on here, as and when I have been motivated enough to take some. 

I'll let you know.