I recently read a blog post, which posed the question: “Why do you blog?” and it made me think about my reasons for blogging.

The first point to be made is that I do it for myself. I imagine that I could get usage statistics, but I don’t bother to look. I suspect that very few people read my blog and that’s fine with me. So why do I blog?

First – I originally started to blog to force me to get out and take pictures. All of my reading and advice from other photographers suggested that you have to do this in order to improve. I’m fundamentally quite lazy and tend to find excuses not to go and shoot. I thought that starting a blog would give me a reason to go and take pictures. So far it’s worked. I now take many more pictures than I did before and I can see a slight improvement over time.

Second – it provides me with a record of what I’m doing. It’s a bit like having a diary. I can look back and see where I was and what I was doing two years ago, for example. I’m a fan of mysteries and inevitably a police officer asks the suspect what he/she was doing on the night of such and such. I’ve often wondered how I would answer such a question since I can’t generally remember what I’ve being doing. With the blog I can just check the appropriate date and there’s a good chance that this will point me in the right direction.

Third – Very few of my posts are thoughtful. They’re mostly just a picture and some text. Sometimes, however, I’m prompted to put some ideas forward and the blog is a useful vehicle for capturing them.

Fourth – The blog is a useful place to record links to things I’ve found on the internet that I found particularly interesting.

Fifth – The blog gives me the opportunity to combine two of my favorite pastimes: photography and history. I like nothing more that finding an old, interesting building; taking some pictures of it; then doing some research into its origins and history and combining the lot into a blog post.