Ruminations and Procrastina......

Not been very active here or anywhere online for some time.  To be honest, I've been so preoccupied with my "other" life that I haven't picked up my D-SLR since January.  I have dabbled a little in cellphone photography - in that I have switched camera apps on my phone to one that imitates a full camera viewfinder.  I also found a nice panorama app for my phone, so will be trying it out sometime.

I did finally take a couple of films in for developing - a 35mm one from my Kiev rangefinder and a 120 from my Holga.  So, I will be going "retro" with my film cameras!

I remember reading an article (or several, can't really recall) that artistic people tend to go through a lot of "dry-spells" creatively and often re-invent themselves to break out of their rut.  All I know is I seem to have gone through a lot of these dry-spells lately - at least in actually taking photos.  I still have a lot of visualizing of photos, techniques, ideas - I just have a bad case of procrastination and don't put any of these ideas into practice.

Was good to be out and about with  camera in-hand today.  It may have only been five photographs I took with my Holga but it's still five more than I've taken for some time.  Little steps to breaking my procrastinating bad habit.

More coming soon

For anyone who may be interested, I do intend to make this blog more of a repository for a selection of my photographic work.  Time permitting, I will try to keep things a bit fresher on here and post more often.

I will still be posting random thoughts and other stuff when the mood strikes me. 

A new month

We are already into another month, June has slipped away and now we are 6 days into July.  At times the days just seem to vanish before my eyes.

This is going to be a bit or a mixed bag as far as theme...mainly because I haven't really had any direction this last month or so.  I haven't been out photographing things or much of anything else.  About the most I have done is to work more on improving my fitness levels by doing more walking and running - both wearing my Vibram Five Fingers and in going fully barefooted.  I have also been paying even closer attention to the items I eat and drink - in particular how my body reacts to it.  I already follow a gluten free diet but am finding that I need to reduce or remove more items from my diet.

One thing that has likely influenced my recent emphasis on health and fitness is that a good friend, of my wife and I, is undergoing chemo therapy for breast cancer.  She seems to be doing well (as can be expected) and her treatment seems to be effective so far.  Definately happy that things are going as well as possible given the harshness of the chemo treatment.

I should be receiving my next lesson pack from NYIP sometime soon...certainly looking forward to finding out what's in lesson 2 of their Professional Photography course.  Lesson 1 was fun and certainly helped me see some ways to improve my photography.  I'm also hoping this will help me find motivation to pick up my camera again, as I have certainly been a little lax in doing that lately! Just don't seem to be able to focus (pun intended) on any one thing lately! lol

As I mentioned a little earlier in this post, I have been doing more walking and running lately.  In doing this I have discovered an annoying "quirk" with the GPS feature of my AndroidOS cellphone.  I have been using the same walking/running path for both my walks and runs for a couple of weeks now and using my T-Mobile myTouch 3G to record these via use of the My Tracks application.  For some strange reason the distances always differ by approx 0.6 miles between walking and running the exact same track/path.  When I do my run My Tracks (and the GPS) always records a shorter distance than if I walk.  I've even changed some of the application options to "improve accuracy" but it still records my walks and runs at different distances.  This currently has me a little stumped and annoyed.  Not sure what is at fault and/or how to fix it so I have consistently accurate (as accurate as consumer GPS can be) recordings.