The J Curve

Monday, January 01, 2007

Happy New Year

We broke out a wonderful bottle of bubbly with some friends last night, and discovered the official drink of The J Curve....

Starting in mid 2004, I blogged on a weekly basis, then bimonthly in 2005, and just twice in 2006. My creativity here has withered, supplanted by a daily photoblog on flickr.

I have wondered why I find it so much easier to post a daily photo than to sculpt prose on any kind of regular basis. For me, the mental hurdle for a daily photo post is so much lower than text. A photo can be a quick snapshot, without much care for quality, and this is immediately apparent to the viewer. You don't have to waste much time with uninteresting images. With text, if I dash off a few sloppy and poorly thought out paragraphs (like these ones =), the reader has to waste some time to realize that this is a throw-away post, or maybe meant to be tongue-in-cheek. I hold myself to a much higher quality hurdle for linear media — something thoughtful and provocative — and so I procrastinate. Many of my text posts are repurposed material that I wrote for external deadlines (magazines, conferences, congressional testimony), without which I may never had crystallized my disparate thoughts into something coherent.

Anyway, here are my 30 favorite photos and my best shot of 2006. Cheers!