Perhaps it might be more informative to begin with a list of reasons I don’t keep this blog:

• Fame
• Fortune
• Happiness

Not necessarily in that order.

I occasionally visit the blog of another semi-retired photographer, Alex Waterhouse-Hayward, who also maintained a photo studio in Vancouver during the nineteen-eighties. While I shot widgets, Waterhouse-Hayward photographed stars of stage and screen. He has written no less than five “Why I Blog” posts since 2007.

Coincidentally, he calls his blog “A Thousand Words,” the sentence that forms my composite social media “avatar.”

He promises not to “rant,” discuss politics (nonetheless listed as a subject in his site header), religion or contemporary films. No nudes (he crops out the naughty “bits”), no daily news, and no cursing.

For myself, I have no problem approaching the subjects of religion or politics, which often underpin my photographs. I do try to keep rants to a minimum. I’ve considered a separate blog, (Raymond’s Rants, it goes without saying) to indulge my fondness for controversy. Contemporary films? I like contemporary films, but only if they exploit sex rather than violence. 

I illustrated my last examination of the creative impulse with a demure nude (“implied” in Instagramspeak), but I too have passed over the subject, not because of any prudery on my part — I have nudes in my archive — but because “undraped” bodies, as Waterhouse-Hayward calls the nude, disproportionately attract idle looky-loos — i.e. more attention than the rest of my work 🙂

I also see no real reason for gratuitous profanity, though, what the fuck, sometimes, especially these times, a well-placed expletive is the only sane response to the day’s news events, which I may occasionally examine.

I stopped writing for pay nearly twenty-years-ago. Photography income derives mostly from print sales and licensing stock images to magazines and books. Like Waterhouse-Hayward, I’ve found in the age of “everyone with a smartphone is a photographer” editorial magazine assignments have dried up. Perhaps my style, as such, is passé.

In both cases, but more so with writing, I’ve always bridled at deadlines. Not that I couldn’t produce quality work under pressure, but my best work has always had a long incubation period. Sometimes counted in years. This glacial pace won’t do at all for an editor who needs an illustration or essay for next month’s issue of Fine Barbecues, Lingerie & Snowblowers.

Writer’s block, as I complained there, is my default state of affairs. No matter if I sit down at the keyboard at the same time every day, and I usually do, getting one of these posts to the point where I’m not terrified to be revealed as a boring poseur is like self-dentistry without anaesthetic.

I won’t lie and say I “do it for my own pleasure” (see the last paragraph and first bullets). I hope to receive some credit for my trouble. And that’s where the horrors of social media and search engines add their own capricious fun to the daily quest for relevance in an endless ocean of content. If making these blogs is a toothache, then dealing with Facebook support is akin to drilling into one’s skull with a blunt auger.

Waterhouse-Hayward doesn’t allow comments on his blog. Perhaps his (cropped) nudes have attracted the wrath of feminist prudes. Still, to my mind, that’s biting off your nose to spite your face. Would that my posts attract more commentary from visitors, even at the risk of negative feedback. 

I pay a monthly fee for a comment spam filter that catches 90% of links to marital aid ads crudely disguised with praise for my work —  “I appreciate you kindly giving those productive, trusted, educational and as well as cool guidance …” —  and I pay $100 annually for a firewall that blocks nefarious bots from failed states. Though I don’t hold back legitimate comments for review, there’s always the delete button if I deem a comment inappropriate. I’ve never had to use it.

As it stands, over the last month this website — not just the blog section — attracted 711 visitors who viewed 1,247 pages in total. Most — 82% — viewed one page and moved on. Them’s the breaks.

My most popular posts over the long term remain in the technical category … because Google, or photography enthusiasts in general, love geeky stuff. I don’t.

“How to blog” articles remind that the title is the single most important element of any blog post — hence the continuing popularity of “Guitars, gangsters, and g-strings.”

My next most popular page and gallery is the Eighties Vancouver portfolio, which has attracted a large following, without any nude content.

So, why do I blog?

My contemporary (who is a decade older than I) dedicates his online journal to his family, particularly his grandchildren. He regards his entries as a personal diary. Like my blog, he adds written musings to photographs drawn from his extensive archive — superb photos made both under contract to publications like Vancouver Magazine and from personal projects, draped and undraped.

The most gratifying experiences I derive from this lonely enterprise come from the kind of contacts this blog occasionally attracts and remains the most compelling reason to keep an appointment with my inner dentist. Most recently, I received a moving email from the wife of a long-lost colleague, thanking me for inspiring fond memories. She had stumbled, via Google, on a post I wrote about her late husband Peter Kundert, last year. Her correspondence revealed that he had succumbed to cancer in 2003, the year of my first battle with the crab.

Like Waterhouse-Hayward, I occasionally dedicate a post to my love of horticulture.

The rest is a matter of economics. By adding regular blog posts to this otherwise static site, I hope to attract print sales and licensing enquiries, without which the expense and labour of maintaining the site becomes irrelevant. No income, no money for site hosting and plugins, no funds for paper and inks, or photographic equipment acquisition and maintenance. That’s the bottom line.

Because of the shortcomings I’ve mentioned, my output is sparse compared to prolific, near-daily dispatches from blogs like Waterhouse-Hayward’s.

Though the category “Autobiography” collects many of these stories, I don’t consider the blog a personal diary (I have my paper journal for that, which is much easier to write — no self-imposed deadlines, no chance of outside condemnation or embarrassment). My family, for the most part, is a private matter. I don’t labour under the illusion that my personal story is any more important than any one else’s, only that my own memories, through photographs or the written word, might accord with yours in some small way, perhaps inspiring some insight or illuminating a corner of this mysterious adventure called life.