When I started this photo journal on May 13, 2005, I did so without a thought as to how long I would continue with it. I certainly would not have predicted that it would be going strong 15 years later. Even now, I am somewhat amazed that I have been able to sustain the commitment to posting at least one photo and a brief journal entry every single day. To be sure, there were many times when I fell behind a few days and questioned if it was worth trying to catch up. Thankfully, I have managed to persevere and in doing so have done something in my personal life that has always been the ambition of my professional life; creating works of enduring value.

In the beginning, I thought of the blog as something I was creating for myself; a vehicle for helping to improve my photography. It was only when I started to view it is a gift to my family that I found the motivation to stick with it. Eventually, I discovered that it was also something that helped me stay connected with friends and colleagues and even total strangers with shared interests. Today, the site averages ~3000 visits per day! Talk about motivation to keep posting.

I generally spend 15-20 minutes a day on the blog (2 minutes for photography, 2 minutes for downloading and post-processing, and 15 minutes for writing and posting). Over 15 years that works out to more than 1800 hours, roughly the amount of time a person spends at work over the course of a year. Looking back, there are many other things I could have done with that time. From where I stand today, however, I am happy with the choice I made.

Over the coming years, I am planning to clean up formatting issues on early entries (introduced when I switched to WordPress) and to replace many images with higher resolution versions. Once that is completed, I would like to export the entire blog into a book (or set of books) so that all this work will live on beyond the last payment to the web hosting site when I am not around to make them.