Random updates

The last post dates back to March 2020 — what happened since then apart from the obvious? Well no, let’s not ignore the obvious.

A global pandemic happened and it made us change the way we live and work. I’m lucky enough to say the virus didn’t impact much on my profession. From my point of view it meant more adaptation than revolution and it didn’t hurt me much economically — hurt as a human though, that’s a whole different topic.

So, the pandemic. What else? Well I’ve been adapting, working and facing a bunch of health and personal issues. I’m not a person that enjoys talking of his personal life or complaining, so let’s leave it to that. But damn, tough times, folks. Tough ones.

The pandemic, misc issues, what else? I started putting years of notes together into a book — don’t worry, I won’t pest you with ads for it — when it will be ready I may mention it in a post though. It’s a book about photography seen as a tool for poetry and philosophy musings. Not that I think the world needs my book, but I would like to put order in all these thoughts and see if in the end they can be useful to someone, as a way for igniting or contributing to a personal path of research. That’s the idea. That, and helping myself understand what is hidden behind thousands scattered words on countless flying pieces of paper I’ll surely lose sooner or later.

Is this why I stopped posting on the blog? Pandemic, problems and putting order in my thoughs? I guess yes, that’s pretty much it. And lazyness. I can be quite a lazy person when outside of the job framework.

Back to the blog: as you can notice I changed the layout and went for somethinge extremely simple — the basic WordPress theme for 2021, with minor changes. I would like to focus more on words and photos and less on layouts.

Lost posts.

I wrote a couple of posts but never published them, for a couple of reasons.

A third post about the Ricoh GR III, after testing it again — but in the end the whole post was random words that I can sum with “nothing changed compared to what I wrote in previous posts” and so I saved you some time by not publishing it.

The other post was a very long one about Olympus: they sold the Imaging Division to JIP — if you care about that brand you already know the story. To summarize that post in a sentence is much harder. If someone is interested in reading it I’ll publish it though. It’s mostly my expectations for the brand future and why I think they got into this situation.

The future.

The initial idea for the blog was to write topics condensed in few paragraphs, with some random photography to add visuals. Mostly photowalks with models, because they’re easy, I am lazy and they offer the chance of creating something interesting to most. Of course my plan derailed very soon, because I started doing reviews and then the virus made photowalks much less practical. Again, it’s all about adapting! Reality rarely bends to our plans.

What I would like to do is to post more frequently (well not waiting nine months for a new post would be a start!) and touch more of what matters to me in photography. They may turn to be quite short posts and I don’t expect them to become as popular as my Ricoh GR II review of course, but such not popular topics are the reason why I started the blog.

I used to write a lot of such ideas as captions to Instagram posts — can you imagine, I was so naive. Of course people rarely read captions, and since I often archive posts, most of these snippets of photography and poetry are now hidden. If I post them here instead though, there is the chance someone may read them, maybe find them inspiring or useful, and that would be just wonderful.

It seems other photographers are following this idea — distancing from social networks, publishing on their own websites, connecting via newsletters, and that’s just great. I love this little middle finger to Facebook, Google & co. I must confess I developed this idea after reading Dave Morrow, a photographer I suggest you follow too. He has tons of quality content on his website, blog and YouTube channel.

I would like to also write more inside the newsletter and make it more interactive. There are topics and photos that don’t deserve a whole blog post but that can still be worth sharing. I could have questions I may want to ask you, or answers to what you may want to ask me, and so on.

The main function of the newsletter will stay the one of a notification for new posts, but I would also want to do more with it, without bothering you all too much, I promise! My goal would be to send you something you will like to receive and read. Let me know how can I make this possible, I am open to suggestions.

We finally got to the end of this somehwat confused post. I take the chance for thanking everyone that subscribed to the newsletter, everyone that reads the blog and shares e-mails with me. You’re what makes this little experiment definitely worth the time and dedication.

Thank you people! Let’s be strong, bright, passionate.

See you around!