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| Like this 98 year-old steam locomotive operated by the Cumbres and Toltec Narrow Gauge Scenic Railway, I keep chugging along with this blog. Not for 98 years, I can assure you! Lol (click to enlarge) |
This is my last post of 2022. A couple of weeks ago, this blog reached a milestone of 1500 posts. How could I have possibly written that much? That statistic is amazing to me. I had no idea this blog would run this long with that many published posts.
I started this blog in March of 2013 as a way to document a cross-country Route 66 trip a friend and I made. Back then I had no way of sharing our daily discoveries or the photos I made along the trip. I created the blog as a way of communicating with my family and friends so they could follow our progress across country.
After returning, I decided to keep writing as I was encouraged to continue as well as I found I enjoyed the writing and sharing process. For many of the last 9 3/4 yeas, I posted three or more columns per week. A couple of years ago I scaled back to two columns per week as I was running out of interesting topics. What I didn't want to do was write and post topics that were boring, inane, uninformative or relatively useless. I didn't want to waste my time nor yours.
Blog readership across the Internet in general is down and that holds true for mine as well. Where I used to have about 30,000 or more visits per month from over 100 countries, I now average about 10,000 visits per month. That tells me that what I write and show still has interest to some of you. However, I think the photographic audience has largely moved to YouTube and video content rather than written content. YouTube is the new king of content. Unfortunately, I have no interest in making YouTube videos. Sorry about that.
Will you do me a favor? I have no idea as to what types of posts you, my readers, enjoy most. Will you leave a comment so as to give me a clue as to what direction I should go with this blog in the future? Tell me what type of content you find most enjoyable to read as well as find valuable. I generally write whatever is on my mind but you might be interested in other things photographic instead. As I said, I enjoy writing and sharing my work and, if interest remains relatively strong, I will continue.
Thank you all for another good year. I appreciate you giving my words, thoughts and images your time and consideration. I do enjoy sharing all of my photographic knowledge, mistakes, successes, experience and images. My photography wouldn't be half as much fun if I didn't get to share it with others.
Thanks you once again. I hope 2023 is your best year ever!
Thanks for looking. Enjoy!
Dennis A. Mook
All content on this blog is © 2013-2022 Dennis A. Mook. All Rights Reserved. Feel free to point to this blog from your website with full attribution. Permission may be granted for commercial use. Please contact Mr. Mook to discuss permission to reproduce the blog posts and/or images.
Happy New Year Dennis!
ReplyDeleteHere is why I like your site:
1. Your posts about the small towns in your region, which remind me so much of the small town I grew up in.
2. The amount of research and testing you do to solve problems.
3. Your posts about gear that just works for you. Sometimes it's a product I was not aware of.
4. Your travel stories and excellent photos that accompany them.
5. Your takes on the state of the camera industry, and where it may be headed in the future.
6. Your unbiased opinions that wonderful images can be made with just about any modern camera.
Thank you for your input, Jim. Also, I appreciate your kind words. I find it very gratifying to know how much you value what I write. It’s comments such as yours that keep me going as well as give me some direction for future posts. Again, thank you.
DeleteThe image you chose for this post gives one answer: trains! Railroad operations, especially steam survivors, interest me a lot. More generally, posts about towns that are fading away and abandoned or decaying buildings and equipment are just plain fun.
ReplyDeleteIt's always interesting to read what you have to say about general photographic technique and workflow. Maybe not so interesting when it concentrates on the nuances of a specific camera....
Finally, I always like the posts involving birds. My own attempts at bird photographs, whether inflight or at rest, are just terrible and it's nice to see really good ones like yours.
Thanks for your input Bob. I appreciate your comments.
DeleteI would second the suggestions of the other commenters. I have curiosity about your past experiences with film photography, forensic photography, and where you imagine the hobby will be in 5-10 years. I particularly like the advisements about the mundane need To-Do tasks because I need the reminders.
ReplyDeleteI am also interested in your experiences in copying your film library. I remember reading about the slide copying. Any advice from your experience with copying the color negatives would be interesting.
Posts about the new equipment are interesting. I have found by renting in the past 2-3 years that there is more sizzle than steak in the new equipment. Still, I am interested and hopeful that the manufacturers will make advancements using the computational photography developed by Apple, Google, and Samsung.
Finally, your blog is my favorite photo reading because of its varied. I was a subscriber to Fred Picker's Zone VI Newsletters, which I consider the original photo blog. Consider me a subscriber here as well. Thank you for your service.
Thank you for your input. Thank you for your kind words. You have included quite a lot in your comment. One of my ‘winter’ projects over the next few months is to start copying some of my 35mm and 6X7 negatives as I did with my slides a couple of years ago. When I do, I’ll surely report on how I decided to do it and my results.
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