Blogging 101: All Your Photos Are Important, Even The Dumb Ones

As somebody with a masters of fine arts in creative writing and has taught writing in the past, I sometimes get asked to explain the difference between blogging and creative non fiction. One term, creative non fiction, is a general name that can mean almost anything. Blogging can be and is a form of creative non-fiction, but blogging is something very, very specific. For me, it's more multimedia based and less rigorously based on formal essay structure. In short, photos are extremely important, and the more I began to transition from being an published essayist to being an online blogger, the more I realized my ever expanding photo archive became one of my most crucial assets. Yet, it goes even beyond that. I literally take pictures of EVERYTHING now and rarely delete anything. Why? You can never predict when a photo is truly useless or not. For example, take this statue of Pinocchio.

I took this months ago over at the Wanda Plaza near where I live and work in Changzhou. I can't even remember why I took this picture. I think it had something to do with the fact that I always thought it was a touch creepy. Yet, I never did anything with it. I couldn't think of anything to say about it that would be relevant. That would be both here on Steemit and my more focused blogs elsewhere about living in Changzhou and living in Jiangsu Province, China.  Then, the other day, I noticed something a little more creepy and disturbing. 

Now, the statue is completely gone. There is no trace of it back in its original location. 

All of a sudden, what was once a meaningless photo has a minor poignancy of local history. I now have a photo of something that no longer exists. Only, it took other events to make the original photo relevant, and I could have never known that when I originally took the first photo. This is hugely important when your blogging topic is China because things develop and grow here so quickly that whole buildings have been known to vanish in what can seem like days. Plus, anybody who says you are only allowed to use a photo once while blogging is foolish. If they are your photos that you and you alone took, you can do anything with them. Essentially, what you are doing is building your own private microstock collection. I back mine up on a 1 TB hard drive that I dump all my photos into and then categorize into different folders. It would be silly to treat your pics any other way. You can write about a photo ten different ways and get ten different meanings. So, double and tripling dipping the same visual content is sensible. So long as you are making an honest effort to create new content with your text -- and not employing one of those hideous article spinner programs, or just rewriting something of similar meaning only to get around a plagiarism filter -- it's all good.