It comes with the territory.

Churchill called it his Black Dog – the days where it seemed that all the effort and striving were for naught. No matter how you looked at things, all was lost.

Well, it comes naturally with Slavic blood. Like mine. Where else could Dostoyevsky be a best selling author other than in Eastern Europe? And his readers, like Winston, drink to excess, compounding their depression rather than helping it.

I have these Black Dog days frequently when looking at my pictures. The depression part, not the drinking, that is. While I now do my ‘snap a day’ thing on my photoblog that’s not where I expect to find many of my best pictures. It’s a place to think aloud, experiment and cull for later publication. Those that make the cut I place on my more static web site and it’s that which causes the depression.

I mean, after all these years, I sometimes think there is absolutely nothing to show for the effort.

For example, I have always loved this picture, which says a lot about the England I adore – some people enjoying the park on a rare, sunny day with the lady standing in the way only an eccentric nation could understand, to get a better view of a passing parade. I remember taking that as if it was today and I knew it was fabulous. Or is it?

Green Park. London, 1973

Then this one has only improved with age, now that we live in a time where you cannot get within hundreds of yards of Britain’s center of power without all sorts of clearances. I loved it when I snapped it and I like it even more now. Or do I?

Outside Number Ten. London, 1974

I was especially happy with the next image – the light just so, the colors simple. Or am I mistaken?

Thinking of Hopper. San Diego, 1997

The next snap has everything I could think would make a perfect color picture – a sense of abstraction, a monochromatic palette and I love the composition. Or do I?

Sky. Bermuda, 1999

For an abundant sense of mystery, I adore this. Or do I despise it for its sheer ordinariness?

Penseur. Cayucos, 2005

Finally, I keep telling myself that my best is yet to come. That I still have ‘it’. That my sense of color and composition gets stronger with the passing years. Or is this simply self delusion passing for a defence mechanism?

Minuet in Green. San Francisco, 2009

Do you see where I’m coming from? Sometimes it just all seems hopeless. Maybe this whole photography thing is just a mindless time sink?

Well, I’m 58 today and that alone is sufficient cause for Depression.

My new photoblog.

I miss photoblogging.

I don’t miss the pressure of ‘one snap a day’, but I do miss the opportunity of presenting my work in a clean, uncluttered format. Just the pictures, without too much in the way of explanation. If a picture is worth so many words, it shouldn’t need many to explain it.

So a month ago I decided the time had come to cease publishing my own pictures here and, instead, decided to post them in a dedicated photoblog, designed to show photographs.

With much help from friends who pored interminably over draft designs and pretended to be interested, I got something which seems half decent. Thank you Gregg, Ed, Leigh, Rio and Roy for your constructive criticism, technical assistance, patience and corrections of my worst boo-boos.

So, without further ado, go to my new photoblog by simply clicking the picture below.

I have included a few dozen recent snaps to get things rolling, mostly ‘never published before’, as the saying has it. There’s an RSS feed if you want to use your feed reader to be automatically alerted of new posts.

Alone.

G1, kit lens.

In San Francisco’s Tenderloin district.

In the Mission District.

G1, kit lens.

The Mission District in San Francisco is not only blessed with that city’s best climate, it also has much of visual interest.