the goods are elsewhere

Hi, until i've setup an RSS from my site into here plz don't expect it to be updated cuz im busy writing the same misc bullshit grey-on-black here:  https://jacoblambertphoto.com/blog-rants-stories-adventures/

Looking back as means to finally move forward.

Before I truly bring this blog into the now I’ve got a few years of retrospection to catch up on, and although most of it is gonna be between me, this text editor and the draft function, it’s something I gotta do.  I’m not saying I’m gonna start filling in the gaps since I somehow decided that social media > then this, I’m saying that I need to reunite with this fraction of my digital self.  Mainly so that I don’t spend the next year talking in past-tense.  I am going to fill the gaps, but these are a lower priority and I can slip those posts back into their correct chronology, cuz fuck the algorithm, time is true, stick to it.  Part of me wants to rant about that too, but I took care of that back in 2014, it’s on here somewhere. 

I must admit, before moving to Canada this kinds of images were but a figment, now I see them regularly.  Except only in Winter and it rains pretty much every day so it’s not the fog that I’m hurting for but the sun.

In fact it rains an average of 193 days a year here… that’s been tough.

In the recent migration of this insanity I found myself reading a lot of my old posts, more of it then I’ve ever read in any close succession prior and I’ve been struck by a double dose of wig.  Firstly, how is it even possible to be as disorganized as I used to be with photos/everything, in that I was making posts with, for eg, 6 photos that were completely unrelated to the text or each other, and from years apart, let alone a dozen hard drives and computer iterations.  The lesson? Anything Is possible if you put your mind to it..

This is usually what it looks like on a good day in winter… not the glorious nature lazers of the previous image but ample glory nonetheless, especially with Mary Lou in frame.

How?, I’m not sure, why?, I assume cuz they were in situ, but that’s the intrigue – how’d they even end up there? Well, I just dumped shit on my desktop… Ive come a long way, per se, but right now I struggle to complete a single folder, let alone dabble across 17 and pick a few miscs to wrecklessly relate through even the faintest of tangibilities, typically nonsense.

Checking in on the great great great great great great great great great great great grandma of the woods. She’s doing okay and at ~600 years she’s got a few more greats to come.

Honestly I fkn love it,  albeit in detriment to progression and re-realisation.  I sit here now, much further along my somewhat idealized progression of photo making, somewhere that would’ve dosed my amateur self in total bliss.  Yet here I am, a contemporary Lamb, thinking the shit I was spewing 6 years ago is gold.  Crazy yes, completely expected less yes, a jab in the GSD gland, FK YEEEEAHH!

Arbutus Bark bleeding rain at QEP.

All of that immediately aforementioned was unexpected, mainly because I used to think my blog’s value was the photos, and that naivety was something I’d yet to learn.

This is Spring…. Seasons are really something, when I say seasons I mean more than just the blisteringly-hot-all-day-long season of Queensland.. Do miss it a bit but.

But why the desire to get shit done?  I am now totally aware that I thoroughly enjoy the restropsect of the story and reveling in writing’s ability to imprint emotion, so trying to repeat past styles instead of progressing aimlessly is going against what I really like – truth.

Secondly (finally), If I can continue meandering alongside my desire to ignore any kind of structure or direct influence, with a goal simply to deploy nonsense to the meta verse, then I win big and every crash of my impulsive digits is time well spent, or backspaced, but either way, it’s mine forever.

Spring again, perhaps even more obviously than the last.. Vancouver rips the Chezzy Blozzas haaaardd and for a few weeks/1 month it’s insane – kinda like the Jacaranda mayhem of back home but with added colour, and mayhem (it’s insane, i guess instagram is a whole other thing compared to when I left Aus almost 3 years ago)…  This is from shooting with George Bailey  and May Constabel for Landyachtz Bikes in Stanley Park, well we rode to the west coast of Bowen Island but that’s a different rant.

Return to the blogosphere

My glorious return is nigh thanks to the extreme labour that has gone into building this site myself and now migrating and reformatting 10 years of atrociously self coded blogs from blogspot, so nigh it is that this foray into procrastination (writing this) is probably the actual return, so really its not nigh, its now.  If you’ve followed any of this, especially since the hiatus commenced in ~2017, you’ll know that producing stuff for this purposeless blog was became increasingly challenging, but the desire to post was what got me through the editing phase, my least favourite bit, but it was enough to edit – these days I pretty much just shoot (except work stuff, that requires editing) and put them in a folder I forget about.  Mb I need to reproach my current editing style in lieu of something more exciting, which’ll be tough to find cuz I kinda have issues with the very nature of editing.

Over the hiatus (which I may still be in, only time will tell) I searched for answers as to where my desire went and why, or I guess how, and while working through the blog migration process I noted a particular point in my timeline, and it was not when I stopped posting with any keen-ness, but was when I finally gave in and set up an instagram for my Photography – actually the worst thing I ever did for my photography – not only was the ‘work’ it provided the worst, and from typically horrible people, but the platform itself cares nothing for photos and works to quantify social proof through tools that don’t rank – the fact that photographers post selfies, let along get more likes is really all I need to say, but there’s more, mainly that to do well on IG you need to stick to a single subject, and to a lesser extent style, which is the absolute last thing I want to do with my photos.   I’ve always had qualms with photo-viewing in the digital realm, combine that with tiny phone screens and the masses and photos became more of a social credit than they did art, or a medium of expression, or anything worth worrying about. Instagram destroyed purity and visual splendour, instead opting for a platform designed to assig caliber to one’s ability to garner likes and to shoot the same thing over and over again.  Don’t get me wrong, the first few months were fun….

Camosun Bog, a 2000+ year old ecosystem that was almost entirely destroyed in 75 years of population, dumping and invasive species pressures – oh and they cut a powerline trail right through the middle of it…  The Sphagnum Moss found in these types of bogs is quite the organism and was used in applications from insulation to stuffing wounds – it’s like the polyester of the pre-petroleum world.

What I really enjoy, and enjoyed, about this blog is that it isn’t socials, you have to come here (these days probably from socials……….), you made the choice to engage, you weren’t forced to engage by the act of scrolling or the mechanism predicting your behaviour.  The amount of freedom of expression this enables me is immense and something I’m only wrangling with now.  I was posting on my blogspot before FB was a thing, let alone IG, so back then it was easy to stay the course but as these social apparatus invaded our culture and my psyche I got even further away from the core of my passion.

Looking west towards the Granville St Bridge with downtown on the left – shot from the lil park that Mary and I were v. hard lurkers, rain rain or rain before moving away from the Fairview Slopes… what a name.

I think another mechanism in my retreat from the blog was that I started aiming for too much, for eg, I’d go over seas for a month and then sit down and be like okay here’s 10000 photos to go through for work, and by the time I was done with editing, I was kinda done with the photos themselves – let alone sitting at my computer editing shit.  And on top of that, writing about a month tour is a gargantuan task and really the project of getting it onto blogspot was too gargantuan, and not really what I wanted this blog for.  I fell in love with this for the misc and for the micro adventures but now that I’ve got this website and the means to control it all I can now do both. CHEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Pitt Meadow Marsh Dyke Trail – bird watching was through the roof, as were the gravel trails.  This kind of view is pretty standard in & around Vancouver but the wild thing is there’s pretty much nothing behind those mountains and this is pretty much the case all the way to the North Pole. 

This rant is serving a few purposes: procrastinating grinding through and reformatting old blogs, a marker for the blog’s transition from google’s platform to my own and to help rationalise what it is about this that is important – which is the journal nature of it.  I think my next post will be vast in time but brief in that it’ll overview my timeline over the last 2 years for my future self, before diving into journalling the lil adventures and times that make life great.  

Really it all boils down to me wanting to spend time in photoshop that i’m not getting paid for – I say this because in migration I found about 35 blogs, all with thousands of words, that are drafted.  Most of them are from the dark times, and I kinda wanna train a NLP bot on it – and another on the happy times, and see what they have to say to each other.