A Year in Pictures

Back from a holiday trip across the west coast, where a sun starved me relished on the California sun, I find myself occupied in running through all the pics and thinking about how I should have clicked more.

I’m not big on resolutions, maybe because they don’t last. But they do push you to try something for a while. So I decided to make a very small one for me. To take more pictures. Since there’s no baseline metric as to what ‘more’ translates to, I’ll try to take and post at least one picture every week. This will force me to go out at least once and capture the beauty. I recently got a new toy, Cannon Rebel T6, which along with OnePlus 3 is what I’ll use to take my pics.

One small issue is to figure out which platform to use to post the pictures. I like Instagram and its community, but its certainly not ideal for this. They recently did away with the Photo map which was one of my favorite features. I have a defunct tumblr blog which was modeled on Dustin Curtis’s life blog. I rarely use it but I liked the platform. I hope Yahoo doesn’t kill it, or Yahoo itself isn’t killed. I obviously am too old to post pictures on Facebook. There are certain communities, like 500px which are worth trying. Or maybe I’ll just build on top of some of these services for this.

Apologies if you came here looking for my pictures from 2016. As a bonus, here’s some from my recent travel. I took an Amtrak for the first time - Pacific Coast Starlight which goes from Vancouver, Canada to Los Angeles. My terminal stations were Seattle to San Francisco, with some stops in between including Portland. One great thing about the Amtrak is that it allows you to take stops, and resume your journey on the same train in the next N days. This, and the convenience of relaxing in the observation car with your kindle instead of eyes on the road might be the only justification of taking this mode of transportation. For one thing, it’s terribly slow. The same journey is a 2 hour flight, 12 hour drive, while it took the Amtrak around 20 hours. Maybe this is why train journeys are not popular in this country, even though it has more rail network than India and China combined.