10 years of photo-blogging

Frosty Morning, LaHutte, Switzerland, copyright 2005-2017 Douglas Stockdale

Okay, it’s actually been a little over ten years ago that I started photo-blogging, which was in April 2007, with this being my first post. I thought it might be charming to revisit the same Swiss winter landscape, this time in color. More about this photo in just a moment.

First, a big thank you! for those who have followed me and my photographic posts over the many years.

Since this was Labor day, I thought it would be a great occasion to update this blog. While making the changes I noticed the side panel and that I had started photo-blogging over 10 years ago. Opps! A bit late in this important shout-out, but photo-blogging is not what it once was. As is Facebook, Instagram and a few other versions of social media deemed important to an artist career.

So some quick stats; in the past 10 years I have made over 1,000 posts (actually 1,080) and this blog has been viewed over 130,500 times. In comparison my book review blog, The PhotoBook Journal, has over a million views which is just approaching 10 years.

I will admit that a few years back in 2013 I came to closing down this site and during that time I was not adding many posts, but nevertheless I stayed the course. I suspect that I will continue to post on this blog as it is a defacto web site that probably gets seen as often than my web site. It is also interesting how some really old posts and related photographs from Singular Images still comes up in a lot of Google searches.

Frosty Morning was photographed early in my digital conversion period as I was still hauling around my Hasselblad film equipment, nevertheless I was at that time start to poke digital capture and explore it’s possibilities. The camera I used for this photograph was a 4 Mpeg Canon G2, a nice little rangefinder that I affectionately called my faux-Leica. I believe that I also had a twins-lens 6×6″ with me on this trip as well with 120 color film and in looking back, the photographs I enjoyed all came from the little Canon G2. Where the G2 was suppose to be the back-up, it quickly became the primary.

I had been using Photoshop since 1991 when it first came out and another couple of other digital photographic software programs before that. So I was not a stranger to digital. At the time of this photograph (2005) I was more interested in the software and digital printing capabilities and only starting to determine if digital (camera) capture might be a worthwhile alternative to analog film.

The occasion for this photograph was during an assignment that I was working at a site bit further up this Swiss valley in La Chaux-de-Fonds. I would fly into Zurich, catch the express train to Biel and then switch to the local red train to La Chaux-de-Fonds which would slowly meander through the valley and stop at every small station in between. You could jump off the train at one of these small villages, walk about and then catch the next train heading the same way one hour later. This is the photograph I made on one of these stops in the winter of 2005. I still enjoy this photograph for the quite winter composition as well as the memories it brings back.

Cheers!