The posting process actually starts weeks in advance with meticulous planning and research. The process carries through and ends only after a crack team of highly paid editors has thoroughly examined each post for the quality. Thus, with the utmost desire for perfection in mind... do we return to reality where we shall see that my creative process in no way resembles this.
For starters, about the farthest out my "preparations" go is a week. Generally after I upload a week's post I go check the long-term forecast for the next week. I usually keep tabs throughout the week too (though this is mostly a side effect of checking to see if I'll need an umbrella for work on any given day.) Weather is one of the biggest things I take into consideration when choosing a place to go adventuring. Hiking up a mountain in the pouring rain is just as miserable as walking a flat 10km in the boiling heat.
Now fast forward five days. It's Tuesday morning. Assuming it's not a laundry/housework weekend I'll generally be checking my e-mail and mulling over what to do/ where to go. If I'm lucky I might have received a tip from one of my students about someplace cool to go. Or maybe I've gotten some inspiration during the week and will be burning to do something special. Otherwise it's generally a throw-darts-at-a-map type decision process.
Usually by the time I've made my mind up it's late morning. Then by the time I'm showered, dressed, have my bag packed, get out the door, and am on my way to the day's destination it's about lunch time. Typically making lunch an early stop on any adventure.
The actual adventure part has changed (for the better, I think) since I first arrived in Japan. For the first few months I was only covering a few kilometers of turf each day. This had a lot to do with the summer heat (not to mention how out of shape I was.) In addition I was using my Canon IXY10 which is a pocket sized point-and-shoot digital camera which had a tendency to stay in my pocket. Since summer has slipped into fall it's possible to walk more than two meters without sweating buckets. Sans car, walking everywhere has built up my stamina (remember that hill I lived on top of for three months?) I'm now able to cover much more ground in a given day than I was before. Lastly with my new Nikon D60, a full sized DSLR camera, I have a tendency to wear it around my neck (very tourist-sheik) and since it's always out I have tend to take more pictures.
When I get home in the evening, I first plug my camera into my laptop and download all the pictures I've taken. Next I import said photos into Apple's iPhoto for ease of review. I then back-up all of the weekend's pictures to my external hard drive (unlike real photos digital "negatives" are a lot easier to accidentally delete/erase/corrupt and lose forever.) Once the pictures are safe in at least two locations I erase the camera's memory card so I have lots of space the next time I want to use it. With the addition of the D60 to my setup there's a new step of cleaning the camera lenses (which are a lot more sensitive than the little IXY10's.)
Wednesdays mornings look a lot like Tuesday mornings. Occasionally I'll have enough forethought on Tuesday to plan Wednesday as well which gets me out of the house a little faster in the morning. The main difference is what happens when I get home in the evening.
Wednesdays, once the cameras are emptied and cleaned it's time to sort through some pictures. As previously noted I've started taking a lot more pictures (I took more photos one day in Kyoto last week than I did all 6 days I spent in Hiroshima.) The nice thing about digital photography is the ability to take as many pictures as you like without having to worry about film/printing costs. That being said I end up with a lot of junk shots; pictures of things I though were interesting at the time but didn't photograph well, pictures taken with poor lighting, artsy shots taken for the sake of aesthetics. With the unusable shots out of the way it's time to find a few pictures that best represent what I did on a given weekend.
Next up is taking the selected pictures into [digital photo-editing software name here] and making them Internet ready. First, if the lighting or color of a photo is off, I correct that as best I can. Next, I have a tendency to hold my camera 1 degree clockwise off of straight so any picture with a horizon line needs to be rotated. At this point any cropping needed is done as well. Also, before moving on I try to remove any faces accidentally captured (Japan is very big on personal privacy. When in Rome...) Lastly, every picture, regardless of being edited or not, is shrunk down to about 1/6 size to make the resulting image file easily uploadable/downloadable.
Moving on it's time to open up Firefox navigate to Blogspot and get to posting. Because of the way Blogspot's interface works I usually upload all the pictures in a given post first, as adding them later is a bit tricky. By the time all the pictures are in order and uploaded I have a pretty good feel for what I'm going to write. Knowing full well this will make some of you shudder (though you've almost certainly realized it by now) but I typically write without an outline just typing whatever comes to mind as I go preferring speed over accuracy (hey it's my blog, not my autobiography.)
Once everything is typed up I give it the once over and a hit of the spellcheck button. Once any readily-visible/glaring errors are fixed I click the upload button and poof! auto-magically my post is available for everyone to see. Once I check the uploaded version for formatting errors I head to the weather site and the cycle begins again.
In the future I'd like to work on adding a few more steps to my process. For example I'd like to be tagging photos as I add them to iPhoto while the memory is still fresh so I won't be stuck going "what the heck was that a picture of again??" down the road. Also I'm searching for someplace to upload my entire photo library online. It's a little tricky to find the right place when you have a stock of 7205 photos taking up over 21 gigs.
My blogging equipment (click for larger image.)Well, I hope this was insightful, or at very least not totally boring. As I feel motivated I'll try to add some other content besides just "what I did on the weekend" posts. Until next time:
Jaa Mata Ne.
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