Untitled Symphony No 140 in Blue.

Being a not-so brief explanation of this Alt-title nonsense.

For some time now, I’ve been adding Alt-titles (Alternate titles) to my posts at the end of the post.

This originated with a post by John at Notes to the Milkman  “What Title Should I Give This Post”  speculating about titles (in blogs and art).  In it he mentions something I personally found quite amusing, > quoting the artist Damien Hirst: ” In a TV interview Hirst said “[A work] is either titled or it’s not and Untitled – what’s that? It’s like calling your kid Untitled. ‘Untitled Number 1, dinner’s ready!’ It doesn’t really work.”  ”

I started putting little Untitled Jokes at the end of my posts calling them Alt-titles (with the hope that those who know how to code html would get the extra joke). Jokes,  limericks,  musicially inspired Untitled Titles abounded, until now, (for the moment) I have settled into the Alt-title Untitled Object No. X For …. format.

I credit John for the inspiring this idea, as well as Richard of The Future is Papier Mache , who pointed me to this post. Richard also experiments with many devices for post titles – including my current favourite, where he names posts after book titles and then tells you where the book sits in his house. Ben always includes a joke at the bottom of his posts and I credit him with the idea of putting the “joke” at the end of my posts.

And there you have it. Alt-titles.

Kill-ratio

My kill-ratio status refers to how many photographs I take versus how many I present. Typically if they are captioned, I don’t count them because it’s my blog, my rules. And often the captioned images are more explanatory, or not mine. Day 94 – Unknown Cable started off my kill-ratio status updates:

“p.s. Been thinking a lot of the concept of a kill-ratio, where you kill most of the ideas/concepts/whatever that come to the table first and then you’re left with the “one”, or the few. With project Obso, I end up shooting (the luxury of digital photography) dozens or gadzillions of images, and then the task at hand is to get a good kill-ratio. The out of focus ones are the easiest to murder of course, as are the not so well lit, and the ones with little bits of stuff in the background I didn’t notice are also fairly easy to discard. Then the task becomes more harder. Obso is helping me get better at this, but it’s still a challenge..

What is your kill-ratio like?”

Of course, it could be argued that better than a good kill-ratio would be to begin with shooting less and that happens sometimes too.