baldysblog.co.uk

Over the years and sometimes painfully, I came to learn that most things “take twice as long to do and cost at least, twice as much in resources – generally money, as originally planned. As a consequence, by the time I hit 40, I had evolved into a pretty reasonable Project Manager who delivered to time and to budget on the things I undertook.

However, the real “breakthrough” for me had come when I realised that the “development” elements or phase had to be totally separated from the “production” phase. Now whilst this may seem an obvious move, if you look at the most spectacular project failures, at their heart lies just this very problem whether it be on Military, Business or Civil Projects. It is sometimes simplified to a question : “What real problem are you trying to solve ?”

What Bought This to Mind…

…was my current and personal project. The main idea behind baldys-somerset was a personal journal of the County covering my rambles around the Somerset Levels. On the surface, that seemed fine enough, it could be of interest to anybody who wished to visit the area, a web site with lots of pictures, probably a selection of Google Maps, historical background and so on. Although using “blog” software to do it, my intention was to produce more of a fortnightly magazine than a conventional blog.

If there was a commercial opportunity to be had for me using this format, it may be through selling prints of my pictures featured on the web site. With this in mind, I bought a new A4 Ink-jet printer to check the quality of output and so on using different papers and “modern” colour durable ink systems.

In reality, the kind of commercial printer that I would use for production of my own prints, would cost +£600 and likely an initial +£300 investment in materials to run on it, back up ink sets etc. To put that into perspective, even this “intermediate Epson A4 P50” I bought for test purposes, only cost about £90 but even although I had a reasonable stock of Epson photographic papers already to work with, by the time I bought two back up sets of ink cartridges and some speciality papers to experiment with, I spent over another £100.

Printing Pictures

In fact rather more than I expected came out of these print runs that set me on a slightly different tack. There are friends of mine who say they can recognise my pictures instantly and whilst under certain circumstances or picture types, I can understand what they mean, as in music, so too visually I have very catholic tastes when it comes to subject matter.

For me it is more a case of ‘photographic opportunity’ than me being dedicated to any one subject. Yes I love anything that flies bird or plane but whilst Herons and Egrets are brilliant birds, I am no ornithologist ! However, as I sifted through a selection of pictures to print out and further manipulate, I became increasingly aware that I was more interested in the pictures than I was the photographs – yes there is a difference.

The Digital Potential

Digital photography has bought with it an absolutely amazing range of possibilities in terms of what you can do with your images. Even relatively inexpensive compact cameras are so clever that you can do a large amount of basic editing using the camera alone beyond that, even beginners camera software will do auto corrections for common mistakes such as “red-eye” and allow you to save your images in a variety of formats plus post to the web. If it is “happy snappy” stuff, you can get by without even using a computer, take your camera card to a Chemist or Super Market and they will have self-serve units where you can run your prints off instantly.

Beyond that in the “Professional” and “Pro-summer” markets especially using RAW formats, the potential is mind blowing and there is plenty of high quality software programmes that can deliver efficient workflow solutions to process very high volumes of pictures. I can only allow myself about an hour each morning for my ride but even so and depending upon the opportunities, it is not unusual to have taken 100 pictures during that time.

Now clearly, not all will be “keepers” but you need to get them up large on a computer screen to check them out full size before you decide to keep or delete individual images. For this job, I use Adobe Lightroom which is a wonderful photographic tool.

But There is More…

As you move beyond just processing and cataloguing raw images, there is software like Adobe Photoshop where you can completely “re-make” a picture, combine multiple images to create totally new ones and using software like Corel Painter, move into digital art. Add to this pure drawing programs and whilst your journey may start with a photograph or even part of one, where you end up with your final images, who knows ?

It was as I was playing around with the software and the printer that I realised that my “baldys-somerset” project was still in the development stage and that rather than rushing to publish content, I should stop, stand back and consider just exactly what “question” I was trying to answer with it because it became clear to me that my original idea was probably total pants !

Baldysblog

In part when setting up Baldysblog, I was interested to see whether I could sustain the effort to keep posting because whilst easy to set up, the world is littered with blogs that die for lack of input. After almost 2 years and an average of around 4 posts per week, the fact that I am so opinionated or motivated by what is mainly a political site seems to have answered the “sustainability” question.

But within that is also something more important, at no time have I sought “popularity” with baldysblog, whether people read it or not doesn’t even matter, a worse case scenario is that it is somewhere I park ideas that I can return to later. Whilst I write what I believe to be true at the time, I may change my mind later in the light of other information and so on, if nothing else, it is a very personal view of the world. There is one final thing though, could I really call it a blog ? Blogs tend to be short, my entries are more like essays.

Baldys-somerset

I finally realised what I wanted to do, in reality I’m going to publish a “book” as a series of short stories over time – the time it takes to have nothing more to say. They will be both intimate and personal, less about geography, more about my reaction and interaction with living in Somerset but more than this, a bit like a “Winnie the Pooh” book, I want the pictures/illustrations to be totally integrated into the essays.

I want to reflect my life in both words and pictures and don’t care whether it is commercial or not so, back to the beginning, I am still in the development phase of “baldys-somerset” but knowing that is very important.