As I said a couple posts ago, I’m writing this in April. I’ve been super behind in wrapping up last year and also still haven’t written/put together that A/B split post I’ve been meaning to write.

Also, I said this in the post for 2023 but I’m often quite bad at keeping up with this site. And honestly I still feel that idea of wanting to do more, write more. But also this past year I’ve also given myself more grace to not do things I don’t want to do. So I may not write as many posts and that’s ok. Ultimately this really is a personal space that happens to also have pictures.

But let’s talk about what’s coming up. I’m posting this about halfway into April and there are a couple of reasons for that. At work, I’ve been super busy and honestly I haven’t had the energy or motivation to get more done here. But more excitingly, I’m rewriting this site! I originally set up this site as a simple blog just to get it going and I did very little customization to it. Honestly, I’ve never loved how simplistic it is and I’ve never loved that it’s so text focused from the home page. As a result, I wanted to spend some time both learning some new technologies and also rethinking and rewriting this site into something that is both visual and text oriented. I probably won’t be done until mid May and there won’t be any other posts until I’m finished but I want to write this down as a way to commit myself to it. I’ve already started but I really just need to buckle down and do the actual interesting bits. At the end of this rewrite, I want to make the template open for use and maybe make a couple other versions in different technologies, but we’ll see about that last bit. As a part of this process I’ll make sure to add the entire backlog of posts so it maintains its history.

Anyways, enough site talk. This is mostly a photography thoughts site so I want to talk about my photography in 2024. Considering it’s already April, I can talk about what I’ve already been focused on and what I want to focus on more for the rest of the year as well.

So far in 2024, I’ve been focusing more on 3 subject compositions. Obviously, not every band or musical act has 3 or more members in it, but when possible I’ve been trying to understand those dynamics more intuitively. Additionally, I’ve said in the past that I naturally bias towards showing the entirety of a person in a frame. I’ve been pushing myself to be more ok with just parts of people. This allows for more flexibility in what I am able to display and should overall be beneficial to my photography.

Another focus has been on more outdoor photography. 2022 focused on “spaces between” and I want to continue doing more of that. But additionally, I want to work landscape photography and macro photography into that. I also want to spend some time doing explicit portrait photography outside with strangers. I’m a naturally pretty shy person but I want to push myself to interact more, not just with my environment but the people in them.

I also want to briefly mention that picture I pointed out in “The 36”. I want to explore mundanity a bit more. What kind of twists can I put into generally mundane pictures and scenes? In that picture, it uses rotation in a distinct way to create a visual obscurity that isn’t necessarily immediately obvious but works to transform the image when noticed. What other possibilities are available here? In that picture, it’s very simply set and requires some very specific conditions. What are those and where else can I stretch things?

Lastly, and I’ve probably also mentioned this here and there, I want to focus on single subject photography. With just one subject, what can I interact with in the background to make exciting stories and pictures? Part of this will probably go with those portraits, but it’s something I think about from time to time when I’m at a show that has an artist on their own. How can I create a powerful and exciting story? As a photographer focused on film photography, I’m not likely to, nor am I aiming to, get the absolute sharpest pictures. So what and where do I create excitement and power?

I’ve already actually taken a lot of pictures in 2024 and I want to talk about a good number of them. But again I’ll wait to get to those until after I get this site rewritten and set up. That’s it for now and I’ll be back hopefully pretty shortly.