Going with the flow
May 18, 2008
Water is endlessly fascinating, like fire, especially when moving. It’s an overall impression and the sense of movement that we perceive; it’s impossible to capture and contemplate the instantaneous form of the water surface. That’s precisely what a camera can allow us to do, of course.
The result is an image that, because of its stillness, fascinates by pulling me in to examine those amazing squiggles. This is the leisurely appreciation denied me by the original subject.
The closer I look, the more compelling it becomes. The only limit is the resolution of my camera sensor. And even that is a pretty soft limit, since this sort of image can look good even soft.
These elegant patterns appear as decoration of the surface, but in fact they are reflections of branches, cloud, and sky. In what sense is this a photograph of water?
Filed in: Musings.
Steve,
I bounced in here intentionally from some of your other writings on the net.
I like your approach here and want to follow along.
As you know blogs are structured for reverse chronological order.
I think this project of yours would benefit from some form of chronological presentation.
I don’t really have a good solution, but did take a crack at making compendium pages on my own blog that might serve as an example of a temporary solution.
You can check one out here….
http://rvewong.wordpress.com/storys/scene-of-the-crime-intro/
This project follows the lives of whitetail deer near my home in spring.
Bob,
I like very much your table of contents as a structure for the project, and I’ve thought of doing something similar, though it would be longer and somewhat redundant with the archives. But it could be more nicely presented that way, and allow a little annotation. I think your stories would be easier to follow along if each chapter had, at the bottom, a clickable link to the next, so one wouldn’t have to return to the contents each time. That would essentially give the effect of a dedicated blog for each story.
As for chronological order, it’s certainly true that this project develops through time, though less linearly than your deer or robin stories. New readers might want to start at the beginning (!?) and step along, and that could be suggested with an explicit link to the first post. But I do believe it’s important to have the front page be the latest installment, whether or not there are regular readers. As it is, my project is more like a journal, so I think the familiar blog format basically fits. However, I’m actually in the process of redesigning it to be somewhat more book-like and less blog-like. I’d appreciate your thoughts when I roll it out, probably in the next couple weeks.
Steve,
Agreed, the blog format is good, especially for the author and readers that keep up to speed. For those that bump into a blog containing a project, it’s like entering a conversation in mid stream. It would be a nice addition to the blog format to offer the chronological view in some way.
I think your idea of a link to the next entry along with a link to the beginning of the project sure makes sense . These two together should be a reasonable solution. Heck, a link to a table of contents could also be useful.
Now, if only the blogging software could do all that for us automatically.