What does it take?

So far, I have posted blog entries for the first three days of our recent trip to Italy. The entries showcased Padua, Venice and Florence. But, I’ve got five days worth of photos to go. When will I be done?

This is an interesting question, both to you my friends and family who are excited to see more of our trip and to my bosses (both at work and at home) who are excited for me to get back to work 🙂

To answer that question, I need to explain a little bit about what goes into making a blog entry of this sort.

  • I start by reviewing all of the photos from a given day (150-250), discarding the disasters, cropping some, straightening some, correcting the white-balance on some and adjusting the tone or exposure levels on some. This can easily take 3-4 hours.
  • As I review the photos, I review our itinerary and my notes from the trip, sketching out the story I want to tell and selecting photos which help tell the story. This takes another hour or two.
  • Then I write the blog, uploading the selected photos and inserting them into the story. This takes another hour or two.
  • Next, I review the entry, make any edits or adjustments and publish the first draft, up to another hour.
  • Next I start the process of uploading the day’s photos to Flickr. Fortunately this is a process I can start and walk away from. Unfortunately, each upload is limited to 200 photos so I have to come back and add those that didn’t fit the first time.
  • After the Flicker upload completes, I sort the photos by date/time taken (or scanned for a few) and save them as a set. The flicker process takes about a half hour of my time, but takes another 3-4 hours of elapsed time.
  • Finally, I edit the blog to add a link for the Flickr slide show and make any adjustments I thought of while reviewing the slide show.

So, you can see it is difficult to do more than one entry a day, when I have most of the day to work on it – as I did Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I don’t have much free time this week, so I won’t make as much progress. I do have some evenings when I can spend some time and hope to complete a blog for our first day in Rome, with side trip to Ostia Antiqua by the end of the week. We’ll see what happens after that.

Thanks for your interest and kind words of support and encouragment!

Steve

One thought on “What does it take?

  1. Well, this home boss thinks she is doing an amazing job of letting his vacation from home responsibilities continue (for the most part anyway) 🙂

    Love that he’s sharing so much with you all since I haven’t taken the time to do so.

Leave a Reply