One More Month

Patience. I don’t have enough of it.

At least I think that I don’t. But, I’ve been around this place for twelve years. That indicates a kind of patience. Doesn’t it?

I have to question my choice about staying around for so long. This is the time of year when I look at numbers and start thinking about what they mean. I’m not somebody who studies the numbers and worries about them.

Today, I’m worried.

The visits to Storyteller have dropped by half year-to-year. That’s reflected in monthly and daily visits. There may be three reasons for that. Social media in general has lost its luster for a lot of people. I look at Facebook and I realize there are a lot of names I haven’t seen in a long time. Twitter followers rise and fall regularly. Followers on Instagram seem to be growing, very slowly.

It’s not just me.

A lot of my colleagues and peers are discussing the very same thing.

There’s also the burn out factor. Not mine. Yours. I may have stayed around too long. My act has gotten stale. After the start of my archive review, I realized that my best pictures are behind me. Maybe my best posts on Storyteller are behind me. I don’t know. You may be tired of me.

Aside from a drop in readership on all socials for many of us, there is a big disruption going on with all of them. There are two new Twitter-like social media sites.

Many Tweeps have migrated to them for two reasons. Twitter is a cesspool and Elon Musk is ripping it to shreds. There are also other sites like Tumblr that have been around for a while and are good places to share pictures.

I’ve also gotten re-involved with LinkedIn. That’s where my best social success has been. I was offered an assignment and have made a couple of sales… in the last six weeks. That makes sense, all kinds of people are there, hanging out and actually doing their jobs. They need and license photographs.

So.

With change of the year comes changes in how I approach the internet. I’m not sure how it’s going to shake out. LinkedIn is very interesting because developing clients was why I originally started using social media.

This picture is very interesting to me. This is one of my earliest experiments in layering. I was staying in a hotel and getting bored I photographed the curtains and the deepest background. The foreground was also made then. You can see my feet in about the middle of the picture.

Also in the middle there is what looks to be a young woman standing at a counter. That’s the layer. This might be the best example of my layering because it looks real. But, it took a lot of work and that’s why I stopped for a while. Too much work.

That could mean that all that I wrote about my numbers dropping might not be about social media posters burning out or staying around too long. Instead it could just mean that we are lazy.