I pinged all of the thripp.com blogs on Technorati using this tool, and now Brilliant Photography has been removed from Technorati. Guess they thought I was trying to game the system (good guess on their part).
Technorati is a blog tracking and ranking service. The main ranking is “authority,” which is based purely on how many blogs link back to you. Since all thripp.com blogs link back here (in the footer of each one), my authority should have shot up from 11 to 71. My blog is still listed on my user page, with a modest authority of 17.
I’m taking the Technorati link out of the Brilliant Photography footer. Our community deserves recognition.
I remember in 1st grade, doing calculations on how much time I’d spend, say, brushing my teeth each day. If I use five minutes per day on that, that’s 1825 minutes per year, or 30 hours, or a whole school week! My, how much time that was wasting! That’s 2% of my life!
Of course, keeping your teeth clean is very important, a task well worth 2% of your time. But it is when we apply this sort of bean-counting to everything we do, that we run into problems.
When you try to break your day down into minutes and then assign chunks of them to certain projects, like “shoot creative photos for thirty minutes,” it works well on paper, but then in practice it falls flat. You might not even notice it at first. You’ll be busy following the list you made to the letter, taking photos that are decidedly uncreative, thinking you’re making some big accomplishment. Then when you’re waxing the car (or whatever the hip thing is to do nowadays), and you see some great scene like Leafy Sunset 6, you’ll ignore it because it’s not on your list. You’ll miss out on all sorts of opportunities.
You can’t schedule creativity or inspiration. In fact, I’d go so far as to say you can’t schedule your life. Sure, you can make a “schedule” and follow it, but it’s not going to be any better than what you’d do applying yourself without confinement, nor will it wring an ounce of efficiency out of you.
Apportionment’s real value is in building discipline. Once you’ve become disciplined, meaning that you’ve found goals worth focusing on and you’re working toward them, scheduling is just a waste of 2% of your life itself, because you’re so in tune with your work that rigidity shackles your …
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I was waiting for this quick-moving train to pass, so I took a picture of it, moving the camera with the this car as I exposed the image. It took me 30 tries, but I got this good one. To get a slow shutter speed, I closed way down to F22. Panning is a good technique; you should try it!
Canon Rebel XTi, EFS 18-55mm, 1/13, F22, 18mm, ISO100, 2008-05-13T17:08:44-04, 20080513-210844rxt
Source image. I think there’s some dust on my sensor, but I’m not going to try removing it because it only shows up at small apertures like F22 here. I cloned it out and added some nice colors and contrast. The sky is over-exposed, but I don’t mind it here; seems to match the movement of the train somehow. 
Download the high-res JPEG or download the source image (Canon Rebel XTi RAW file).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Credit me as Richard X. Thripp and link here.
