Where is this blog going?

A perfectly valid question to ask about a blog that hasn't been updated in almost five months. And, frankly, I don't have a proper answer, although the plan is to wake this place up from it's slumber in some manner.

But let's take things from the beginning.

Unlike this blog, the Mariella won't be going anywhere today, as she is strike-bound in Helsinki. This photo shows her departing Helsinki on 2.3.2019.

For the past months, I have been busy polishing the text, images and layout of my next book The North Sea Bridge – Ferry Connections Between Scandinavia and Britain 1820-2014, which went to printers last week and should be with us before Christmas. I will do a proper blog entry on the book once the actual physical copies arrive. The book being completed is relevant for the subject at hand because I discovered that working on the book, plus various other jobs, and being the main parent of a two-year-old left me with little time or energy to post things here.

But, at the same time, after having been an active ship photographer for well over a decade – and a ship photo blogger for nine years – I find myself less interested in it than I once was. This is not to say that I wouldn't be interested in ships, and photographing them, anymore, but I do feel that my development as a ship photographer has reached a plateau, making the process itself less interesting. Simultaneously, I have less time to myself than before (being a parent and all) and less interest in using that time for going out on the kind of long photo sessions that used to be the norm for me. It doesn't help that, ultimately, the ships calling in Helsinki stay pretty much the same year in–year out (even on the cruise ship side) and I have good photos of most of them already. Thus ships for which I feel going out for photos would be warranted are few and far between.

All this is not to say I wouldn't continue ship photography, but it likely will not be frequent enough to keep the once per week schedule I have tried to maintain in the past. Added to all this is the fact that I have been somewhat displeased with the format of this blog for a long time; I remember talking with the editor of CruiseBusiness.com back in 2015 that I would like to move to a format more based on travelogues and experiences, rather than dry reporting of facts.

As said in the beginning, I'm not sure where exactly this blog will be going. It might be that after such a long break I will end up simply not restarting this blog and this will the penultimate entry (I will do the one about the book in any case). What I am currently leaning towards, however, is finally changing this to a blog that is more about travelogues, other shipboard experiences, and more thematic photo sets (rather than ones about an individual ship). I have some ideas on this front that have been thinking of doing for a while, and maybe now is the time to turn them to reality?

Of course, if the latter way is the way that I'll go, that will likely mean the update frequency will continue to be of the sporadic once-a-month kind, as there will be less material actually worth an entry – but on the other hand, the entries should be more detailed.