Hello, I hope you’ve all been well. It’s been a while since I’ve posted on here; like I mentioned last time, the winter months aren’t particularly my favorite to shoot photos in. I’d much rather stay indoors where it’s warm, especially when there’s 5 inches (~13cm) of snow outside and it’s 15F (~-10C) out. My fingers just kinda stop working when it gets that cold.
That being said, my effort has gone elsewhere in the past few months; I finally put together that YouTube video I’d been working on since July (long story; you can watch it here and there’s a commentary I made on it here), and I do have some ideas for other videos on video games in the queue. Still, after jamming out an entire video over the course of a 15-hour day I was pretty burnt out on the idea, so I’m taking a break from that as well.
I realized that I found myself hand-writing a lot of letters for Christmas to send to friends; buying presents both adds up in expenses and feels kinda impersonal, particularly when you can’t think of something particularly meaningful to get someone. I also realized I don’t have a lot of creative hobbies that lead to a finished, physical end product. So instead, I turned to writing letters out, and potentially sending a gift alongside it if I could find one that seemed fitting. I did a bit of thinking after the holidays and decided I actually liked writing, so I splurged a bit; got myself a couple of nice rollerball pens, a fountain pen, and now I’m re-teaching myself to write cursive, as I haven’t written in cursive for over 10 years at this point. I’m also using an old Palmer Method book (which I’ve linked to here, although you don’t need to pay anything for the PDF) to learn how to write without moving my wrist or fingers, so solely with my arm and shoulder. It’s slow going, but I’m hoping to have my handwriting in decent shape by the time I want to write more people letters again.
As far as photography, though, I haven’t been shooting much at all. However, I wanted to make a photo book out of some photos I have, partially just to have a physical thing I helped make, like I talked about above, as well as some other personal reasons. So I finally went through the ridiculous amount of photos I took on vacation last June while traveling with my friend, and ended up doing edits to about 140 of them. The 90 or so that made the final cut are below.
Being a bit introspective, I’m fairly happy with my first year of photography. It’s been a good learning experience, creative outlet, and driver for me to go try new stuff, including going all the way to Ireland. It was fun to get out and learn how to compose shots, and eventually to transfer a bit of that to actual videography work. I hope when it gets warmer out I’ll be able to go hiking and exploring more again and finding fun compositions. For anybody who’s reading this, thank you for taking some time to read my rambling, nonsensical blog. It’s kinda just nice to have a spot to post my thoughts without worrying too much about them getting taken down or any sort of metrics. Take care of yourselves, and I hope you have/had a great start to 2024.
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