Kevin's Walk 7 is up and running now, but there's a chance I might go back and tweak the banner a bit since there are parts of it that don't hit me quite right. There isn't much content yet, but every now and again, I'll be slapping up posts as I prepare for the coming walk. Daily posting won't be happening until the walk begins.
I'm also thinking of trying something new: blogging only ten pictures each day of the walk, then filling in the rest once I'm back. So I might still take hundreds of photos per day, but I'd limit myself to showing only ten. This is nice because it'd save me time with captioning, etc. Normally, on these walks, I spend hours and hours every afternoon and evening uploading pics, resizing them, and captioning them. It's a lot of work to do after having just walked eight or nine hours, and as I get older, I can feel my stamina for such work eroding.
Limiting the photos to ten a day is also less laborious for you, the reader. Scrolling through hundreds and hundreds of pictures is tiring work, and while the people who care about me the most might like the pics, pretty much everyone else ends up bored, I'm sure. It's like being subjected to a relative's long slideshow about a recent vacation: painful. By adding in the rest of the pics after the walk is done, I give people a reason to come back to the blog, and the pics themselves can serve as a "permanent" record of my travels.
This is especially true this year because I'll be doing a walk I've done three times before. I'll be re-photographing things that faithful readers have already seen several times. By narrowing the photos down to ten, I'll be selecting more mindfully and, I hope, providing a more entertaining selection of pics instead of throwing a whole truckful of images at the reader willy-nilly. We can save willy-nilly for later.
Ultimately, this is mainly about saving me the effort of dealing with hundreds of pics while I'm walking. Luckily, my Samsung Galaxy S21 is a much-improved version of my previous phone, so I think I can store all my walk photos on the phone without having to do a file dump to free up memory. Even so, I might offload some pics while I'm on the trail.
I usually end up deleting 90% of the photos I take. Maybe a carryover from the fact that I have done a fair amount of film photography. When there are only 24 (or 36) shots on a roll, I was pretty careful what I take.
ReplyDeleteLike pretty much everyone else, I generally shoot digital photos now, but I also always ask myself the question - e.g. Ten years from now, If I am showing people pictures of my trip to Ireland, are they really going to want to shift through hundreds or thousands of photos or are they going to want to look at the top 100? And the same goes for myself, Am I really going to want to look at 27 pictures of XX castle from slightly different angles, or will I just look at the top 2 pics?
I do enjoy your photos, but in this case, I think that less is more.
Just my 20 won worth of opinion.
Brian
Good points.
ReplyDeleteFor me, well, I've enjoyed reviewing my previous trips, and going through every single photo has been a pleasure, but the "less is more" idea has been on my mind of late, so what I'll probably do is something similar to what I've done on previous long walks: I'll select a "top ten" to put up on the blog while I'm doing the walk, but when I'm back from the walk, I'll upload all my photos for each day, creating "photo essays" as I've done in the past. People then have the option of going through all the photos if they want, with the "top ten" photos being the first ones they see.
Also:
ReplyDeleteA friend and commenter has noted that he prefers the prose content of these walk blogs to the photos. I guess he's more into the interiority of the experience than the visuals. Since he's lived in Korea a lot longer than I have, my photos probably feel like old hat to him.