I’d intended to come back to weblogging before this–especially since Dave Rogers predicted that I would “post something” before the end of 2006. For, even though I wasn’t writing for my own weblog, I never stopped reading weblogs. In fact, weblogs have been my primary source of information since I stopped reading newspapers, listening to the radio, and watching broadcast TV after the Federal election in October 2004.

Much of my spare attention since I stopped weblogging has been taken up with watching (and thinking about) movies and–since July last year, when I bought a Ricoh GR Digital camera–taking (and thinking about) photographs. In the limited time that was left, I installed (and played with) WordPress and worked at redesigning the templates and stylesheets.

A couple of weeks ago I was drawn to comment on a post of Tim Bray’s about high-end digital compact cameras. Tim’s subsequent description of my “paean to the Ricoh GR Digital” as “the most interesting part of the conversation” was flattering but his stout defence of DPReview (at which, in his words, I’d “sneered expressively”) and his stated desire that a camera’s output “approximate what [one's] eyes report to the brain” demanded a response.

A short comment about the damage done by sites like DPReview which fetishize the technical aspects of photography grew into a longer argument that photography has hardly anything to do with literally transcribing how our eyes and brain perceive the world. I caught myself thinking: “This should be an essay, or at least a weblog post.” That was the moment that I knew I’d relaunch the weblog.

Whereas the previous incarnation, The Heart of Things, dealt with subjects ranging from CSS to the Iraq War, this time I’ve decided to restrict myself to the things which lie closest to my heart: photography, the cinema, and (indirectly) the Japanese language. We’ll see how it goes…