Written, spoken, and unspoken

by Jinryu

In the past, one of the things I never really did with my blogs is put much photographic content up. Maybe this was because, when I first started blogging, that this was all supposed to be about practicing me writing at a time when writing was in itself as a hobby to me.

My blogging habits have really changed over the last 30 years though– some of it has been due to changes in my personality, while others are more accurately linked to me “growing up” and having different things to talk about.  There are other secondary drivers, such as technology, free time limitations, and other hobbies… but I suppose all things change.

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Now that I’m in Japan with [CM] on the first real vacation we’ve had in almost two years, I’m reminded of something that my friends and I used to say– it’s a bad habit to blog only when things in life are going poorly. Which is how we used to blog in the late 90s– blogging was a way to self-medicate from young adult life.

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Nowadays, a lot of the angst is gone. I’m a married man now. I’m not about to be deported, I have a steady job, and secondary jobs teaching (which I’ve always wanted). Life is good. There are of course always ways that life can be better,  but I don’t whinge as much as I used to, and I’m a much less angry person than I used to be.

 

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When I look back at it, the reason why I never uploaded much photo content was probably because of two reasons.

 

Firstly, at the height of my interest in photography, I was young adult dabbling 35mm film film in an era where scanners were expensive, and worst of all, slow. Digital cameras were starting to come out on phones, and I remember that my Sony Erisson K750 mobile phone (I think that’s what it was called) was way ahead of the competition… with a 2.0 MP camera.  I wrongly predicted that digital would never overtake traditional film cameras, and for a long time I was correct, given that the quality of digital cameras was really, simply, shit. So I just didn’t have many digital photos. I still have binders full of 35mm negatives at my parent’s place in Montreal though.

Secondly though, size limitations. Do you remember a time when blog sites like Xanga had 200 MB limitations on “multimedia files”? Even though photos back then were only a a hundred kilobytes at most at native digital shooting resolutions with my phone, a single scanned image was far greater, and conceptually, 200MB just seemed like this looming bugbear if you wandered off too far. So I never wanted to put myself in the position to have to pay more just to blog (even though I did sign up for Xanga Premium LIFE, at some point). To me, I felt that the words would be enough.

This is a stark contrast to today, when I’ve got hundred of gigabytes of storage in the cloud. Google and Nikon even give you unlimited storage of standard resolution (about 2megabyte) files.

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I’m not saying that I’m converting this into a photoblog. But when I get back to Australia, it is an option to consider, if it doesn’t involve too much re-uploading.

Some of the pictures that we’ve picked up over this vacation are just worth sharing.