It’s a question I’ve been repeatedly asked by both my blogging and non-blogging friends. When you write a post, which comes first: the pictures or the post?
The answer, of course, is “It depends.” In some cases, I have a specific topic or theme I want to write about–often, something on my mind that I’ve written about in my paper journal–so then I find pictures to accompany that theme. These pictures might go along with what I’m blogging, or they might simply be whatever pictures I have on hand. This latter scenario is why so many of my posts about Zen are illustrated with pictures of graffiti. Because I typically walk through Central Square before sitting at the Cambridge Zen Center, on any given day that I blog about Zen, I usually have lots of graffiti pictures close at hand.
In other cases, though, I have pictures of a particular event that I plan to blog, so I start with those pictures and basically write an essay “around” them. Some examples of this kind of post would be the entries I’ve written about the Boston Marathon or pretty much any of my sports posts. Given a bunch of photos from a hockey or basketball game, I try to think of something to say that would go along with the pictures. These posts feel more like news articles than journal entries: I’m basically reporting on something I did, and I’m illustrating with pictures of what I saw. These posts feel different (neither better nor worse–just different) from the more “personal,” journal-inspired entries.
And then there are days like today when I simply have a picture–in this case, a tiny bee pollinating a cluster of pink flowers, which I took in our backyard one morning this week–that I want to share because I like it. There’s no big story behind how I came to shoot a picture of a bee in the backyard, or how I shot any of today’s other photos on various dog-walks this week. I just had these pictures lying around, so after posting them on Flickr, I tried to think of a reason (excuse?) to use them on-blog.
The all-time classic unanswerable question is “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” For writers who both blog and take pictures, though, a close second in the unanswerable question department is “Which comes first, the pictures or the post?”
Hoarded Ordinaries 
Jun 11, 2011 at 7:06 pm
And as a reader, similiar query Which do I enjoy more? It depends, sometimes the post and sometimes the photos. Generally I love them both.
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Jun 11, 2011 at 7:19 pm
Ah! That’s a question I hadn’t thought to ask! It’s interesting, though, that I feel almost obligated to post both a picture and a post, even if the post and picture aren’t directly related. It’s as if one isn’t quite complete without the other.
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Jun 12, 2011 at 8:45 am
And I just realized – generally the picture is the “hook”.
It’s the picture that grabs me and pulls me away from scrolling through my emails – stops my mind in its tracks. Without the picture, bet I’d keep rolling on-and miss lots of good pieces.
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Jun 11, 2011 at 8:07 pm
I’ve been asked that question, too – like you, sometimes I have a goal in mind, sometimes just random thoughts, and sometimes a series of photos that I really like and want to share. Love these photos, by the way!
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Jun 13, 2011 at 11:32 am
Barb, I’m glad you liked these photos and found my remarks ring true! I think there’s an interesting kind of synergy that happens when you’re in the habit of posting both words and pictures. Even when the two don’t seem to go together, there’s an interesting way that thinking about one pushes you to think about the other. It’s as if one form of creativity leads to other forms, to the point that I’m not sure I could blog without photos.
Suzanne, I agree with you about using photos as a “hook.” As much as I’d like to think that my words alone are enough to “snag” readers, I realize that when I’m surfing around, photos grab me in a way that words don’t. I think I learned a lot from the several years I spent in high school working on my school’s yearbook staff. Obviously the copy we wrote was important, but we all knew that no one would READ that copy if a page’s photos and layout weren’t interesting. I think that’s a lesson that has carried over into my blogging.
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