Projects in 2023

I’m in a bit of a creative rut. We spent the last three months doing some serious travel; when you’re traveling, you never have trouble finding something to point a camera at. We’re back in suburbia for a while and it’s hard to even go outside.

As usual, without constant stimuli I’m back at fretting over gear. I’m waffling between “sell everything and have one camera forever” and “maybe I should get into using zoom lenses”. All of the options are bad. I often wonder if I’d still take pictures of things if I only had my phone.

I’m working out some ideas, in no particular order.

Sunnyland

I decided to do a mini photo project. Or a draft of a mini photo project. Back in May, I put five rolls of Gold 200 through my Minolta TC-1. This is the result. I’m sure there’s a better way to present these photos and to tell the story, but hey, I got it online and that’s a start.

Minolta TC-1, Kodak Gold 200

An Editor

I used to be a pretty good software engineer ^{[citation needed]}. I haven’t been all that interested since I left my Software Engineer Job :tm:, but I woke up the other morning thinking about how to write my own vim-like. (It’s kind of like a roguelike but somehow even more painful.)

Something like:

• Written in Rust
• Roughly vim-like; modal, similar keybindings, terminal only.
• Performance over all else; I don’t edit large files, just brute force for speed.

I don’t even really need a super fast, micro version of vim. I just think it would be fun.

Three Weeks in Bastrop

We’re about to spend three weeks housesitting in Bastrop, Texas. It’s a tiny-ish spot southeast of Austin; the old part of town has a nice character. And it’s just small town Texas.

I’m thinking of spending a few hours every morning - early morning, to avoid the heat - walking around town. Maybe talk to some locals, snap a couple of photos, figure out if there’s a story I can tell. I don’t really know how to go about doing that, but “go do something” is always better than not.

Leica M10-R, Minolta 40mm M-Rokkor

Writing, more and better

I have an “ideas” note with a bunch of random sentences. I don’t question them; they’ve just occurred to me at some point in the past few months. Maybe just putting them into the ether here will allow them to become whole:

• Theonyms; the proper name for God
• Do I believe me?
• That awkward dance you do with a stranger when you’re both trying to find something on the same shelf at the grocery store
• “It might be bad for you”
• Every day, some part of this world disappears forever. It will never, ever come back.
• Intentional, project-based photography vs snapshot photography. Can these overlap?

Here’s to working out of the rut.