Arboneural Network

Feel the connection (you should ... you know you want to!)

For the earlycomers to yesterday's blip I have to apologise for changing it. I've not done this before and it has broken a little rule that I made for myself. I was never really happy with the original shot. It seemed to be the best I had to offer but it didn't really work in colour, nor in mono, whatever I did to it! I know you said some kind things. and it wasn't necessarily a bad shot in any way; it was just that I couldn't engage with it like I normally do with my pictures. It was missing something. And I would really like to thank Bethanne for being bold enough to point that out!

Yesterday my mind was distracted by work and I think I never really succeeded in moving my attention out of the left brain and into the more creative right side. Today I was feeling tired from the programming and found myself thinking about that blip switch and my photography in general. Over the last few months I've become far more interested in mood than in realistic representation. I look for scenes which have a timeless and, in some sense, placeless feel. I guess I look for a kind of universality. I particularly enjoy subverting your perception, processing a photograph so that it becomes quite detached from its specific location, enabling the brain to engage with the raw content of the image, its naked patterns, in a way that is as stripped as it can be of context.

Over time, blipping has become a challenge to not just take a pleasing picture each day, but to take an engaging picture, one with a visual impact, one which, in a way, demands a response by suggesting a mood or a feeling, or even a meaning. I think that's why black and white photography works so well, because removing the colour from a picture is the first step in divorcing it from reality and giving our perception more emotional contact with the content of an image.

Reading this back on the train just before pulling into Ilkley I feel like I could be talking a lot of bollocks here! But there is no doubt that some images are far more engaging than others, and trying to understand how that works is wonderfully fascinating. So no excuses for any pretentiousness. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this if you care to contribute. What makes you give a blip five stars or a heart? Is it purely a gut instinct? Or can it be rationalised?

With a deadline looming for Monday my time on blip is going to continue to be constrained over the weekend. The news is that the blip engineers are introducing more capacity tomorrow morning. Fingers crossed that it will work and give us all a much better experience next week. Good luck guys!