Hooooooly smokes, y’all. First post in eight months, that was a rather substantial lapse in activity here, eh? So where the hell have I been and what the hell have I been up to?
First things first, ’cause I tend to ramble. Before I lose you in loquaciousness, I finally figured out how to get email notifications integrated with this site. You can either use the form in the sidebar or the one below this paragraph to sign up to get an email whenever a new post goes up here (which I aim to be more regular about going forward).
I doubt anyone comes in to check for new content on a regular basis, and it’s easy to miss things on social media sometimes, so this is just another level of convenience if you don’t want to miss out.
As to what’s been keeping me away from the ol’ site here, honestly it was both a lot and not much at the same time, as things like this usually are. I’ve had a tough time finding a groove with my schedule here in Osaka. While you’d think someone with just a few part-time jobs, a volunteer gig and otherwise lots of free time would have no problem taking some photos and posting them up online, somehow I would always find myself at the end of the day with numerous household or personal items still on my To Do list.
There was also more procedural matters at hand. Earlier last year, I migrated away from Lightroom for organizing and editing my photos and moved to the greener pastures of Capture One Pro, which has been such a great decision that I’ll probably do a post on that at some point for fellow photo nerds, but also meant I had to really find a new flow in editing which meant unlearning a lot of shitty habits Lightroom had ingrained upon me.
What I’m saying is I was slow as shit at editing photos.
I fell so far behind at one point that you may recall this tweet that had a slight fetor of desperation about it.
Shot from library showing # of photos since my last post that I have to go through, select & edit. Back to regular updating soon… I hope. pic.twitter.com/yfOcyLRhjS
— Hair Flap Central (@HairFlapCentral) December 3, 2016
While I’m still behind in the queue, I think I’ve finally found my groove in Capture One and am tearing through these suckers.
Compounding the issue of my inhibited photo-editing pace, was the fact that my wife and I visited the UK & US, during which several more hundred photos were taken and piled upon the queue. I’ll probably touch on that trip in a post soon as I get things back up to speed around here.
Finally, there was admittedly, a bit of nondescript malaise in me. I was still snapping photos here and there but there was some unwelcome dash of ‘What’s even the point of doing this all anyway?’ that latched itself onto my psyche and dragged me down for a time. I don’t think I was actually depressed or anything, but the effect was similar.
The up-side to that was that I really had to sit down and reflect a bit about my motivations and goals both with photography and blogging here on Hair Flap and it’s resulted in some realigning of core competencies, while proactively envisioneering effective synergy and web-enabled supply chains, while simultaneously evolving process-centric solutions for efficient strategic theme areas and OHGODI’VEGONEFULLBUZZSPEAK!
Basically, there’s gon’ be som’ changes ’round here, however slight. You may have noticed the subtitle on the banner now reads, ‘A Photoblog From Japan’ rather than just ‘A Blog From Japan’. I’ll certainly have a lot more to say on all this in an upcoming post.
And with that, I guess we’re about brought up to speed. I’ve been doing some minor housecleaning and updating across the site, adding the newsletter feature, and thinking about all the cool little projects I have planned for the rest of this year.
Welcome back and thanks for sticking with me. Nothing but blue skies ahead! 🙂
