Time For Goodbye
June 28th, 2018
I think the time has come for me to officially retire from nature blogging.
There are a number of reasons for this, most of which I won't go into. But a big one is that Facebook Has Eaten The Internet. On the trail, I'll always get more pleasure from enjoying a sighting in the moment, with binoculars, rather than striving to capture it well on camera. But historically, what I got back in the form of blog comments made it more than worth it to occasionally dedicate an outing to photography. (I especially always loved hearing, "you helped me see beauty that I never noticed before.") But comments have dwindled to a trickle, for me and other nature bloggers.
At least one person I know has dealt with this by more or less abandoning her blog and putting her pictures on Facebook. That's not for me. The whole approach of social media (breadth over depth) runs completely counter to my personality. And Facebook brutally resamples, i.e. compresses, i.e. ruins, any photos posted there. (I'm surprised how few people seem to notice this.) Anytime I've shared nature photos on Facebook, the difference between what I put in and what its compression algorithm spits out is simply depressing.
So birding, for me, will go back to being a passionate but largely private hobby. The exception being that I now submit nearly all of my observations to eBird, as I've mentioned before.
My blog and gallery will continue to stay up indefinitely. There's some ten years of material here that I'm proud of. I still see people finding me in the site logs (usually through a Google image search), I still occasionally get email from artists hoping to use one of my photos as a model, and, on very rare occasions, I still hear from people who just plain stumbled across my blog and loved what they saw. That last one always makes my day, not least because it tells me that the corporate web has yet to completely defeat the peoples' web.
I do have a few photos left to show from the past month and some, and a few adventures to recount, so I'll do that in the next post. After that, I'm thinking I might do a retrospective "best of", re-posting some of my personal favorite photos and stories from over the years.
June 28th, 2018
I think the time has come for me to officially retire from nature blogging.
There are a number of reasons for this, most of which I won't go into. But a big one is that Facebook Has Eaten The Internet. On the trail, I'll always get more pleasure from enjoying a sighting in the moment, with binoculars, rather than striving to capture it well on camera. But historically, what I got back in the form of blog comments made it more than worth it to occasionally dedicate an outing to photography. (I especially always loved hearing, "you helped me see beauty that I never noticed before.") But comments have dwindled to a trickle, for me and other nature bloggers.
At least one person I know has dealt with this by more or less abandoning her blog and putting her pictures on Facebook. That's not for me. The whole approach of social media (breadth over depth) runs completely counter to my personality. And Facebook brutally resamples, i.e. compresses, i.e. ruins, any photos posted there. (I'm surprised how few people seem to notice this.) Anytime I've shared nature photos on Facebook, the difference between what I put in and what its compression algorithm spits out is simply depressing.
So birding, for me, will go back to being a passionate but largely private hobby. The exception being that I now submit nearly all of my observations to eBird, as I've mentioned before.
My blog and gallery will continue to stay up indefinitely. There's some ten years of material here that I'm proud of. I still see people finding me in the site logs (usually through a Google image search), I still occasionally get email from artists hoping to use one of my photos as a model, and, on very rare occasions, I still hear from people who just plain stumbled across my blog and loved what they saw. That last one always makes my day, not least because it tells me that the corporate web has yet to completely defeat the peoples' web.
I do have a few photos left to show from the past month and some, and a few adventures to recount, so I'll do that in the next post. After that, I'm thinking I might do a retrospective "best of", re-posting some of my personal favorite photos and stories from over the years.
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Mike
June 30th, 2018 at 2:34 pm
*hugs* I guess the lack of other responses to this kind of confirms the problem... the shining years of the blogosphere seem to be over.
I hope you continue to get some visitors and kudos!
Suzanne
June 30th, 2018 at 3:25 pm
"I guess the lack of other responses to this kind of confirms the problem... the shining years of the blogosphere seem to be over."
Yup.
Thanks for the response and the well-wishes!
mustangsallie
July 11th, 2018 at 8:57 pm
I will certainly miss the great photos and the wonderfully descriptive and amusing adventures that you have recounted over the years. I will have to be content with the pictures on the wall and the album you made for me. I guess all good things must come to an end, eventually. MEHHHH!!!
ghostofwar
September 2nd, 2018 at 3:25 am
youtu.be/4MjLKjPc7q8