Collisions with Reality

There are some things that didn’t quite pan out for me in 2010, but I want to focus on the positive. My family moved to the Bay Area, and we’re having a good time. My son is at a fun age — 14 months — and doing something new every day.

I even accomplished many of my revised goals for 2010. I didn’t manage to take my camera on the family strolls very often — for a variety of logistical reasons — but I finished nearly everything else. Admittedly, I only went carefully through my backlog of photos because I was running out of hard drive space, and needed to archive things. But if I took a picture before December 24, 2010, and I liked it, it’s online. Woo-hoo!

Tomorrow I’ll post my resolutions for 2011. Today I’m just going to enjoy the startling realization that my life is actually pretty well balanced right now.

One of my revised resolutions was to upload the last few pictures from my 2009 trip to Europe. I finally went through them, and there really were only a few worth uploading. I guess it’s a sign that I’ve improved, even in the last year? But this picture has been my desktop background for the last several months, so it can’t be that bad.

Lightroom has been great for helping me organize and go through my pictures. At the rate I’m going, I may actually have to get my camera out and take some new pictures. In my infinite spare time.

A bit of progress here, on several fronts. Not to jinx it, but we are signing a lease in just a couple of hours on a place in the Bay Area! It’s not quite perfect, but we really love the house, so we’ll see what happens.

And I’ve made some progress on my revised Project 52! The educational discount for Lightroom III is a steal, so I bought that and have been playing with it. Hooray for tags! Not only that, I figured out how to sync it to my Flickr account, and it uploads it with the title and caption and tags from Lightroom. Nice. Saves me a hell of a lot of typing in the long run. Here’s a picture I took last month:

I know. Flowers. Backlit. Soft focus. Well, we’re moving to Oakland, so I’m sure I’ll have plenty of opportunities for pictures of urban decay. (Mom, don’t worry, that was a joke.)

Back in January, I made the resolution of uploading at least one picture a week, not counting pictures of my son. This seemed much more doable than all those crazy Project 365 people. And my rule was to upload them, not necessarily take them, so I thought it would force me to go through my archives and upload some good pictures lurking in there.

I don’t know why I thought that even a weekly task was doable. I knew I’d be busy when I went back to work. A rule of thumb that has always rung true is, “Family, work, self: pick two,” and right now it’s clearly all about family and work for me. Even if I have a few spare minutes in the evening, I’m more likely to work on Project Euler than photography. Still, I wasn’t prepared for how swamped I’d be, and we’ve been traveling and we’re getting ready to move and this summer is just insane. Some weeks are just too busy for anything else, and that’s okay. So I’m going to change the rules a bit, and make it project-based rather than time-based. The things I want to finish in 2010 are:

• Update: done! Go through the archives from the Denmark/London trip, and make sure the good ones are all uploaded.
• Update: pictures taken, diptych not made. Do a series or diptych or something on the two Russian Orthodox churches in town.
• Update: done! Go through all my pictures from the Santa Barbara Harbor, and make sure I’ve uploaded the good ones.
• Update: done! One last pass through the 2009 archives.
• Update: done! One last pass through January 2010 – March 2010.
• Update: done! One last pass through April 2010 – June 2010.
• Update: not done. At least twice a month, take my camera on the weekend family strolls.
• Update: I purchased Lightroom III, and have started tagging pictures! Do a much, much better job of organizing/tagging the pictures on my computer, even if it means buying Aperture. (Any suggestions? It has to be able to edit RAW, available for Mac OS X, and cost less than $200. Tagging is a must. I should probably just buy Aperture, shouldn’t I.)

I also finished the alphabet poster in 2010, so I think finishing these goals will make it a pretty successful year.

(And I’ve been flossing regularly!)

Our next door neighbors recently removed some of the shrubbery along their house — probably because they were tired of always trimming it. The houses are very close together, and that shrubbery was shading our kitchen and keeping our place cool in the summer. Alas, now we have to buy curtains.

However, in the meantime the light in our kitchen is awesome, and I’ve tried to take advantage of it while I can. And the kitchen always looks best immediately after a trip to the farmer’s market, when there are tomatoes and squash and nectarines everywhere.

(Week 22 of Project 52! Okay, I might be well into 2011 before I hit 52 weeks, but still.)

Every once in a while, I have to remind myself that the whole damn point of Project 52 was to actually edit and upload the pictures I take, instead of letting most of them fill up my harddrive without a second glance. So here’s some interesting latticework that I got a picture of while getting letters for Sam’s alphabet poster:

It’s not my favorite picture I’ve ever taken, no, but at least it’s not backlit with diagonal lines. Or a beach at sunset. It was worth uploading, though, so there it is.

(Week 21! And yes, I’m still at least a week behind.)