A year of blogging

Tomorrow is a big day for the blog – it will be 1 year old.  It doesn’t feel like a year since I started blogging, and you’ll hopefully be glad to hear that I have no plans to stop any time soon.  I thought today, on the last day of my first year as a blogger, I would take the opportunity to look back at the year, share a few personal highlights, and say a few thank yous to some people who’ve helped the blog grow.  First though, it is customary for me to tell you about the image above, and today is no different in that respect.

This “photograph” is actually a mosaic made up of every single image that I’ve posted on the blog in the last 12 months – that’s 330 images in total.  The mosaic itself has 5000 tiles, so each image appears multiple times, but no other images have been used to create the final result.

If you click on the mosaic above, a high-resolution version will open in a new window, but be warned it is 15MB so will take a while to download.

And in case you haven’t already noticed, if you squint, or sit further back, you should see that the mosaic is a representation of what is one of my favourite images from the blog, and one of my highlights of the last 12 months – a photo of the docks in Galway during the Volvo Ocean Race stopover, taken on the June Bank Holiday weekend.  The original photo was first posted shortly afterwards, and to save you a click, looked as follows:

Not bad, eh?  For those wondering, I created it using the excellent and strangely titled AndreaMosaic software.  If you have a large collection of images it’s a pretty cool thing to try, if a tad 1990s!

Over the last 12 months the blog has exceeded my expectations in every respect.  I’ve surprised myself with the frequency of my posts – 330 posts (plus this one) in 365 days is better than I reasonably hoped to achieve.  I’ve also surprised myself that I’ve been able to both come up with images and words to post, and I hope I’ve kept both reasonably interesting, and on occasion, topical.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised also with the reactions to the blog – the nominations for the Golden Spider Awards and the Irish Blog Awards are obviously flattering, but I’m talking also about the comments (more and more all the time) on individual posts, the occasional email from readers in Ireland and abroad, and those people who’ve shared links to my posts with their friends, readers and followers.

I’m a little reluctant to name people for fear of leaving out someone important, but those that do deserve a mention and a thank you include Jennifer, Damien, Treasa, Stephen, Niall, Elliot, Jennifer eile and Phil and all those others who’ve graciously linked to my blog posts from their blogs and websites.  Those who’ve commented on the blog are too numerous to mention, but also get a thank you, while my Twitter followers, and their followers, have been great at spreading links to various posts of mine over the past year.  Twitter has been one of the real drivers of the growth in traffic to the blog, but more significantly has opened me up to a whole new community of photographers in Ireland and abroad, which has been great to interact with.  Through Twitter I came across pix.ie where I attempt to share all the images that get posted here, even if my photo stream there is sometimes a few days or weeks behind.  That has led to me having the honour of receiving their much sought-after Tweet of The Day on a few occasions, something which has been welcome and appreciated.

It had occurred to me to create a slideshow of my favourite images from the blog for today’s post, but when I started looking at what I’d include it would have been either a very long slideshow, or a very difficult editing task.  That’s not to suggest that every image I’ve posted is great – that’s definitely not the case – but many of them are personal favourites for a variety of reasons.

I’m sure those who read the blog regularly also have ones they like and ones they hate, so instead of a slideshow, and as well as the mosaic above (which I do recommend you click on to see it at full resolution), let me leave you with the suggestion that you click on my name below this (or any other) post, to view a gallery of thumbnails of every image on the blog, and if you see one you like and haven’t seen before, click on it to view it larger and read what I wrote about it when I first posted.

That gallery is a birds-eye view of my first year of blogging, and hopefully whets your appetite for many more blog posts to come.

Tomorrow, I start year 2 of the blog with the overdue second installment of my “Flash-lit Friday” series, which will features an image appropriate to the day and show you a breakdown of how I lit it using off camera flash.  Stay tuned for that!