This shot was taken on the ANZAC day holiday, which explains why I wasn't at work on a Monday. I generally don't attend the services (I have some ambivalence about them), but I do usually pause for a moment at both dawn and dusk to consider the significance.

In this case though the sun was already over the horizon and I was doing one of my signature "sunrise over the ocean" shots. The gap in the waves seems to be pointing to this beach walker, though the significance eluded me.

(Oh, "random chance"; yup, that was the significance.)

When this shot was taken (9 months ago) we would have been putting summer behind us and moving well into autumn. Oh, for such weather again...

One other thing that I just noticed; all of the files in this day's folder were .jpgs instead of .orfs. This would have been about the time that I did a firmware update on the E-M1 and failed to notice that the damn thing dumped my preferences.

I'm posting this in January 2017, catching up on unposted PESOs from what is now last year. I have quite a few more PESOs to post for 2016 but I hope I'm not wasting my time. I've felt antsy about PBase's future before but after the Cami debacle (the new ray of hope support admin who apparently lasted about a week), and toting up the numbers for 2016 (see below), I can't help but get a feeling that at some point every gallery, image, commentary and comment will just go "poof". What numbers am I talking about? Between 2011 and 2015 we had between 18% and 23% fewer images posted year on year, every year. For 2016 I had hoped that the numbers would stabilise. Instead they were down by a record 28%. There's no reason to assume that membership isn't falling at the same or a similar rate. And if that's happening then revenue is shrinking at that rate. And revenue is what keeps the lights on.

I want to create an app to scrape all of my galleries, commentaries and comments into offline files, but I haven't even started on it. The fact that I'm still posting here is more an act of hope than of confidence.

Maybe the woman is a Java coder who I can hire to do that application for me; hmmm...

(Edit: On my PBase gallery (where you may or may not be seeing this image) member Robbie 70D left some very considerate constructive feedback long with the comment "Hope the feed back raises your spirits that people do look and care.". This made me think that I may not have been clear enough about what I was referring to above. I'm not really fussed about about how many visitors I get; these galleries are more for me, family and friends (both physical and virtual) anyway. But PBase is losing membership at an alarming and, I would say, unsustainable rate. If the day comes when it can't cover its costs it may disappear and all of the work that has been put into creating the galleries will be down the tubes, and all memories of the comments that people have kindly made over the years will vanish forever. To persist in doing so, or to move elsewhere... that is the question. Though the other question is "where". Flickr for example is part of Yahoo, which has its own financial problems. Facebook couldn't care less about photo quality; it compresses the hell out of photos and only wants them as click-bait anyway. Google+ is a wasteland of weirdness. Dedicated photo sites like 500px or SmugMug may eventually have the same problems as PBase if membership starts to drift away, although they don't have the same issues right now as PBase does - an ownership that is perceived, rightly or wrongly, as being completely disengaged and leaving the site on autopilot - and so on.)

Edit August 2023: Why am I editing this now? Because I'm removing all PBase address watermarks from my images and getting rid of any descriptions that would not make sense on another site. I've had it up to the proverbial "here" with the owners of PBase, with their (in my view) lack of professionalism, rudeness, inconsideration in the way they handle support tickets (that's IF they bother to handle support tickets), and the constant felgercarb that they spout about how they are Working! On! Great! Things!. At this point it's like Lucy pulling the football from under Charlie Brown's foot. How many times are people going to fall for it, when the postings in the News forum (every 2 or 3 years) speak for themselves? Regarding the numbers that I cited... 2016 saw a drop of 28.4% year on year, the highest to that time. Then Covid happened. The numbers 2020 fell by almost 35%, which was not PBase's fault, and 11.34% the following year. In 2022 we had the first uptick in over a decade with an increase of 8.97% BUT, that was simply because people could get out and shoot again and it didn't recover the 2021 drop, much less the 2020 one. As I'm typing now, the numbers are showing a slight decrease for 2023, but there are 4 months to go.)