935 - The Blues Pick On Me

Sure, Martin says “Don’t sweat it!”, but that’s easier said than done.

I had a pretty long pause now. It’s Friday morning and I am still posting images of Tuesday. Oh dear!

These are again images taken with the 70-300 VR on a sunny day. Actually I really like some of them, may drop others, some may not fit at all into the final collection, and then there may be some images that I have missed.

The way I work (apart from shooting) is simple. I copy the day’s images on my hard drive and incorporate them into my image database. I use IMatch as DAM program, but everything that allows for keywording and searching for keywords across directories will do.

After copying, I skim over the images and label them as SoFoBoMo ‘09 candidates.

In the first run I don’t care about anything but these images. If by the end of next week I feel that I severely lack images, I’ll come back to the original collection later, but for now I go strictly to the candidates.

So where’s the blues, you ask? Well, first, there is the delay. I hate delay, but in this case I can’t help it.

Second, some of these images gave me a hard time. Basically my plan is to do mindless shooting first, and only then to see if I can turn the omnium-gatherum into a meaningful sequence. It’s only not as easy as it sounds. While I’m shooting, there is always the impulse to immediately judge it in conjunction with the book.

My best corrective is, to compulsively follow every impulse. For a split-second I may question the possible value of a subject, but then I take the picture anyway.

It does work, really, but it produces a bigger amount of images than usual. Normally during the week I have one or two fits where I produce more than one or two images, the other three or four days there is only one Image of the Day and possible one side image. Over the years I have learned to cope with that.

At the moment it is five, six, seven, eight images that I need to process and post per day, and that slows me down, and that causes delay, and …

“The Blues Pick On Me” by Peppermint Harris is the Song of the Day. I have it on a box of ten CDs called “Rhythm & Blues - Original Masters”, a real treasure box that I have recently bought at a regular price of 10€ (yes, 1€ per CD!). It does not seem to be available in the US, thus I have linked to a four CD collection called “Ham Hocks and Cornbread” that has it on disc three. Deezer has the whole disc for you to hear. The song is track 29.