It has certainly been a while, in fact rather more than that: approx 52 months since the last roving report was posted back in May 2017!
Several reasons for this: family health matters took over my life for a a long time and as a direct result, after posting the Beds & Bucks report from May 2017, the next event that I managed to get to was Pewsey in August of that year. However my rather antiquated and cumbersome photo processing "system" is extremely time intensive and before getting photos, suitably edited, cropped and in a lot of cases due to bad lighting on both layouts and in the halls themselves, quite a lot of tweaking using a very old image software called Paint Shop Pro, the original versions that were made by Jasc Software, not the current Corel produced one of the same name which is far more advanced, but also far less user friendly and simple!
And then there are the captions! A lot of people don't bother with captions, they just upload their photos and leave it to the viewer to try to work out what layouts and owners etc they are looking at. I like to give at least some clues to what the photos are of, which those who have given feedback previously have always commented favourably about. This all takes time and effort as well, and........ well they never got done, the next event I managed to get to after that also got into the queue and on it went.
A constraint of continuing the blog as it is, is that Google in its wisdom won't let you "insert" blog posts between others, they have to appear sequentially. So, as I have always been running what amounts to a continuing diary, then I didn't want to make postings out of date sequences. The result of this is that the backlog got longer and longer and life matters got heavier and heavier. 4 years later I found myself in a position of being 4 years older, but also 2 major illnesses in the family, one ongoing and one over 2 months in hospital and a 2 year recovery marathon, plus a house move in the middle of the pandemic, and in all that time, admittedly slowed by the covid pandemic stuff, I found that I had actually managed to get the camera out and attend 15 shows, 13 of them in the first 2½ years outstanding - 2017-19, just 1 in 2020 and so far 1 in 2021 with the likelihood that things may start to get rolling again next year, so certainly time to take stock and look at the viability of trying to catch up on lost postings and carrying on into the future. BUT I discovered that in those 15 events I took over 2500 images - many of them not very good images as well, so there has been some intensive work and much time spent in recent weeks going through them and getting them resized down to the standard online 800 x 600 format, ready for sifting down to a reasonable number and then starting the big task of captions!
With most attenders at events seeming to have very smart phones that take wonderful photos just by pointing at the subject, then there may not be much of a need for "roving reports" such as mine any more, only time and feedback will tell on that one.
Anyway, in case it takes a long time (I think it will) to catch up, and I hope it is catch up, not keep up as more events start to reappear in the diary hopefully, I'm starting the ball rolling here with a little taster so that each of the 15 events visited by me since 2017 get a mention, and then the outstanding reports from these can be built as time allows hopefully in the near future and not in another 4 years time!
Here's a brief taster then of the 15 so far "missing" roving reports:
5 August 2017 Pewsey - Wiltshire Group 009 Soc 16th biennial members day and MOMING 17
14 Layouts plus 7 MOMING layouts
Berger Hall - Bill Corser 09
Unfortunately I was unable to get to ExpoNG in 2017
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.