Started a list of photographers I like or admire currently. I think this is a better way of keeping track of them, than having lists in notebooks or links in txt files all over. Just publish the current list, simple, always know where to find it.
This leads me to think about this site as a personal notebook as well. Somehow works better than a fully private journal.
Few points from the last couple days:
Well, anyways.
I don’t know why I keep updating this log, but this feels like the most personal, most authentic, most real thing I currently do online.
Compared to regular social media (mainly instagram, but also facebook), this doesn’t feel like a performance, maybe partly because none of my friends even know about this website.
Compared to my main website, this doesn’t feel like a portfolio I should curate for the benefit of potential employers.
I’m not sure what this is for me, this weird braindump-blog, but it’s what I want my online presence to be like for sure.
The question is, how?
I have a few problems. First, what would happen, if people would know about this site? Would the feeling change? Second, this type of logging/free writing/stream of consciousness writing works with text and with random thoughts, but what about photography? I’m not sure how that would work, what would be the photography analog to this type of journaling.
The key benefit for me here is that I don’t really think about what I will put here and I don’t edit this at all.
That’s the magic of this space: I can sit down and start typing, usually as a way to think something through, to verbalize my feelings on something that I’m contemplating or fixated on in a given day.
But with photography I’m not sure how I can NOT edit, it kinda doesn’t work that way.
Even if I manage to photograph completely intuitively (another challenge I’ll discuss later on), I’ll still end up with a lot more pictures than I want to post, anywhere.
That means I’ll need to look through them and pick the ones I want to put up, and hey, that’s editing! That’s more time contemplating, judging, selecting and this is exactly what I want to avoid.
Avoiding this is mental judging and weighing and editing is what makes this log fun and freeing for me.
So I sat on this a bit and I think the key is the mood and the workflow I set up. I usually write this log at night, just before going to bed, or when I take a moment alone, to myself. It’s also set up in a way that I don’t have to think about the setup. I just make a new file, write and git commit. There is also no structure to think about, no categorization, no different types of posts. It’s just plain text, in a box, that’s all.
I think that my photo-log setup should be similar: one type of post, that’s a daily entry. Convert the pictures in-camera to JPEG, dump them in that day’s log entry’s folder, git commit.
This needs a few tweaks: image size should be capped at the max width of the page (720px) and images should be displayed one after another, at full width. This needs tweaks to the layout, to give a clearer separation between days.
I won’t need any javascript, no lightbox, so no thumbnails, either. Just a folder, with an index.md linking to images in the same folder. This is a bit more manual work than I’d like, but I can maybe write a simple script that generates the md file content based on the list of files in the folder.
I think this is a good setup. Clone fono.day, add width for images in css, write a simple script to generate markdown image embeds from a folder’s contents, that’s it.
Well, anyways.