Some light in the dark

Every year on New Year's Eve, I take a shot of this candle holder at work on our dinner table. Every year I fail to capture it properly. It is better this year, but not quite right yet. The reason I am posting it is that all the other images are, like myself, rather too blurred for polite society this morning.

May I wish you all a very happy new year, and the hope that it fulfils all of its promise for each and every one of us. That includes Blipfoto.

Yes, I considered the Blip blip project today but find that I cannot throw my heart into it. I have been keeping my counsel to myself but... in for a penny and all that:

I will not be pledging.

Yes, I love this environment and the people and the photographs. Yes, I will miss it if it goes away. That is why I stumped up for a Lifetime Membership. I believed in Blipfoto and what it was doing.

It was a very difficult decision for me to make that payment. I have been without income since 2002 but do not become an official pensioner until later this year. My DH retires early, in August, this year but will not get his full pension for far too many years to come. Things are tight now but were even tighter when I bought that Lifetime Membership in order to help Blipfoto. 

I feel that I have played my part and my bit is done. I will not be sending good money after bad. I simply do not have that cash. 

The worst part of it for me is that the proposed figures pitch annual membership at a level I will not be able to pay. So, why should I pledge money that would have to be scraped from an already too-tight budget, to set up a site that I will not be able to use in the future.

Are we flogging a dead horse anyway? I believe in Darwinian Evolution: Only the fittest survive. Blipfoto turned out to be far less fit for its purpose that we have wished, otherwise it would not have gone under. Can the new team turn it around make, it fitter, set it in a survivable niche - well, I do hope so but I do not see how that can be done and let us face it, they are going to have to be business genii to first get the right balance between paid accounts, payment level and those woolly promises of "some" free accounts and then go on to rapidly build numbers to yield economies of scale.

I am not normally a pessimist but in this case I cannot help but be.

All the same, I thought I'd shine a light. Miracles do happen sometimes and we might all hope for one still.