Tuesday, January 5, 2010

I blip. Do you?

Someday, I’d like to come up with something that spawns a new vocabulary, a new language.  OK, I’d settle for coming up with a new word, a verb even.  For example, the twitter people can lay claim to “tweeting” and we know who came up with “I’ll facebook you.”  How about being “googled” as we all have been or “do you have a kleenex?”

Well, the folks at www.blipfoto.com are at this very game as they attempt to coin the verb “blip”.  To blip means to take a photograph and then to post it to a blog the same day you took it.  There’s something inherently important and immediate about snapping a shot and then posting it on the self same day.  Now, If you took an Ansel Adams-quality photograph of the Half Dome in Yosemite National Park but lost your internet service that day and couldn’t post immediately, you’d have a decent picture, but certainly no blip.

Somehow, the act of trying to capture one good photo per day (I’ve attempted it – see here) helps you to become a better photographer.  The idea is that you begin to notice simple, ordinary things around you in new and different ways.  You begin to develop your creative eye.

But, it takes a commitment.  I’m going to give blipping a try.  I created a new daily photo journal, entitled “still looking” and here’s the link.  I’m not claiming any artistic merit here, just that I’ll try to do this every day.  Every single day.  The process is greatly facilitated by the fact that blipfoto has released a free iPhone app that allows you to do all of this (including taking the picture) from your iPhone.  Convenient.

The internet world is suddenly buzzing about blipfoto… and so I’ll give it a shot.

Will this make me a better photographer?  Who knows.  But I will be able to say: “I blip.  Do you?”

Man, that’s going to get annoying…

No comments:

Post a Comment