I spend maybe five hours a week on my photo challenge. This particular work presented some new challenges but at no point was I frustrated by my technology.
We take and share a well crafted photograph every day. Each week we start a new page and let the first photograph set an agenda for the week.
I set out by bike under bright sun that created interesting texture on a moss covered retaining wall. Maybe rock walls this week? Maybe just rocks?
Learning begins with curiosity. When our curiosity is ignited, our minds are literally transformed. We learn faster and retain better what we are learning.
We feel the need to embrace new devices, new trends and especially new technology in order to preserve what has been written and expand the potential for what will be written in our federation.
I will spend an extra hour this week recalling my interactions with wiki and how decisions we have made supported my path from curiosity and wonder to surprise.
# Photography
Lazy Sunday afternoon. I choose to bike the neighborhood looking for inspiration. I take the ebike and pedal slowly. It's a rest day. Phone was low so I plug it into my bike backup charging.
I'm thinking, maybe there is some way I can capture what I like about this route. I know it morning, afternoon and evening. But what it it showing me today?
Boy there are a lot of rocks in my neighborhood. I focus on just individual rocks standing alone. And they shouldn't be buried. More rock above ground than below for sure.
I return on foot with my backup charger in my hip pocket, cable attached. With each stop I unplug, shoot, replug and then squeeze the backup's start button by feel. This was awkward at first but became a comfortable routine that ended with a satisfied beeb from my phone when charging resumed.
This little incident of mastery meant that I was no longer concerned about my phone. The situation is short of optimal but might be beautiful: sufficient, simple and to be remembered.
I saw many attractive stone landscapes but passed them by looking for rocks as I had defined them. The sun angle had me casting my own shadow over angles that would have been attractive. I passed on these too. When I saw an angle that was acceptable by still emerging criteria, I shot and moved on.
After a half dozen exposures I began to have some confidence in my compositions. How could I make this rock more like, or less like, previous photos. Knowing I would have a surplus I sought mostly to provide good material downstream. Small mastery.
I returned home with 26 photos and no notion of how to use them. I tweaked the crop and color of weaker ones and was pleased that they came to life. I can arrow through photos without leaving the editor so I ran through all the rest applying the same changes to each. I could collapse unused edit features so this became the rapid click, click, click, arrow of another mastery.
# Publication
I'm starting to like these photos now. I decide to post them all in order as "details". See Some Photo Details
I normally drag photos to the desktop before posting. To preserve the order I export them in bulk as jpeg to a folder where I sort them by file name. I can't post them in bulk but maybe with an html script? No, too complicated. No mastery here.
I copy the style I have evolved for the Little Libraries including using the street addresses for captions. I had previously mastered this with a temporary destination where I can format and label an image before dragging to its destination. See New Little Library
I develop a tempo that goes like this: select file, drag to temp page, read street address, view region if obscured, edit caption, choose half width, drag to details page, revert the temp page, revert. This seems tedious but it is faster than taking or cropping the images so I carry on with mastery.
Half-size images are difficult to drop consistently. I find some out of order but suspect there are more. Can I write an html script to check? I have a folder properly sorted but the connection between these and the images I've made may be lost. No mastery here but there may be possibilities. See Rocks in Order
I posted daily selections by dragging files into the templated page such that the item identities would match from week to week. Had I not saved these, I could have downloaded the already uploaded image file, but I couldn't drag the image item from page to page and still get the matching id.
I complete the daily selection of seven rock photos. Each day I reviewed the available choices, looked for variety while selecting in order, and finally favoring locations that showed the shape of my familiar route.