It’s been close to a month since I came home from my Christmas and New Year’s trip to the United States and my extended family over there. A lovely time was had and a few pictures were taken, but nothing I am going to share on this blog…family pictures can stay just that - family pictures - and not be shared with the world. That has also been the approach I have taken with my postings on social media in the last several months…not as frequent as before, mostly because I don’t think all my photos need to be seen, not even the ones I happen to be happy with.

I don’t post online for likes, for clout or for monetary purposes, so I am okay with doing that and stick with looking at other people’s works for inspiration. There are SO many photographers out there posting amazing material to be inspired by, so me being a bit more selective with uploading stuff of mine won’t hurt the photographic “community” one small percentage point of an iota!

Having said all these things about not posting things, I do have a few photos in this blog post, taken during the first month of this brand new 2024 on the streets of Malmö, Sweden. There’s a limited amount of light available at this wintery time of year, so the hit to miss ratio is sometimes atrocious when doing street photography…but that is nothing new and something I am okay with. If a picture is a meh or a bad picture (in my opinion) I have no qualms or hesitations about making it disappear, either while still in camera or from the hard drive after import!

I’ve written before about how being very critical of my work and deleting my mistakes or the so-so images have helped boost my confidence in my abilities as a photographer, since when I go back and look at my old photos from time to time I see that perhaps I am not that bad a photographer after all! Getting stuck in a self-deprecating thought pattern is only too easy if you focus on your failed pictures, at least it’s been that way to me in the past.

*This just doesn’t look like a safe position for Dennis to be when taking a photograph… (Malmö, Sweden, 2024)*

Now that the light is returning I hope to increase the number of keepers again, and perhaps I will increase the posting frequency on this blog and/or social media. I doubt I’ll ever be as frequent as I was before though…posting daily sometimes or even several times in a day occasionally. There’s just not that much interesting stuff from me to post!

So what will I do this new year?

In the past few years I’ve done a few “What will I try to do in the upcoming year creatively?” posts, but I don’t think I am going to do one this year…partly because I rarely end up folloing those “plans” anyway, and mostly because I don’t even have a very tentative plan for this year yet! I’ve thought about various project ideas - even about getting back to doing a 365 project again like I did a few years ago - but so far nothing really solid and concrete has materialized. Whenever one does though I hope it will be a fun one that will keep my interest piqued for a good while! For the time being though I will stick with trying to take interesting photos when I am out and about and uploading when I feel the urge to do so!