Behind the Scenes of a Post

Working from home has its advantages and disadvantages.

If I so choose, at any given moment, I can do the chicken dance backwards from my front door all the way into my kitchen while wearing a squirrel on my head.  In an actual office that might be frowned upon.  Mainly because everyone would want to join in, and then where would productivity be?

Conversely, while *I* know that I’m working while I’m at home, not everyone else does.  No I can’t go out for lunch with you.  No I can’t go to Costco with you.  No I’m not screwing around doing the chicken dance backwards … I’m working.  (although sometimes I am doing the chicken dance)

The point is, when people know you’re working from home they think you can leave whenever you want to do whatever you want.  And if the work you’re doing from home is blogging?  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.  Don’t be ridiculous.  Come on out to lunch!  You can do that stuff later.

It’s hard to explain to explain to people how much time it takes to create a single blog post (and I plan to do a post on exactly that later), but to give you a very small idea of the sorts of things that can happen, and the barriers we have to overcome I thought I’d give you a little behind the scenes look from one of last week’s posts.

How to Braid Onions (or garlic).

How to braid onions or garlic is pretty easy.  If you can braid you can do it.  It only took me about 2 minutes to braid my batch of onions.  But to write a post so that you could understand how to do it?  That took a bit longer.

You can have a quick look at the post here to refresh your memory.

The first thing I had to do was find a spot outside that had shade so I could take some photos for the tutorial.  Full sun is bad.  BAD BAD BAD.  It’s ugly.  My front porch seemed to be the best place to shoot, so the creation of my post began with moving all the porch furniture away so I had room to work.

Taking photos is never comfortable.  I’m usually standing on a chair, trying to get a shot while balancing a big sheet of styrofoam for bouncing additional lighting onto whatever I’m taking a picture of or scrunched down like a ball on the ground with bits of dirt stuck to my cheek for most of the day.  Today it was scrunching.

Once all my shots were done it was into the house to upload all the pictures to my computer.  Once they were uploaded I then had to go through them all to pick out the best shots.  Once the best shots were picked out,  I had to move them into Photoshop where each pictures had to be edited.

Some pictures are pretty good exactly as they came out of your camera, but a lot of times a little fiddling goes a long way to making them better.  Enhancing the colours, or desaturating them, brightening this or that … all has to be done to every photo.  With the How to Braid Onions post I had 12 photos to edit, which is fairly typical.

After the regular editing in Photoshop, I went back in and added text to all of the pictures to help make the step by step tutorial easier for you to understand.  Normally photo editing can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, but usually it’s somewhere in between.
 

To suspend it, I screwed a cup screw into the ceiling of my porch.  But it was swingy.
 

So I had to stabilize the camera by running lengths of string to a planter and my front porch light.

Bingo.  It was just enough to keep the camera stable.  Then after all my hard work I went inside for a snack.  Olives.
 

Back outside I brought my pictures up on my computer so I could refer to how my photos looked originally and how my onions were laid out so there would be continuity between the photos and the video.

Then I got down to business, pressed record and shot the video in one take.

Once the photos and video were done, the front porch was a tiny bit of a wreck that needed to be cleaned up.  I should include more shots of the disaster of my house on any given day while doing posts.  It’s quite a sight.

Then comes the business of editing the video which can take an long time.  A really long time.  On average it takes several hours to create just 2 minutes of video, whether you’re talking about a blog, a movie or a tv show.  So yeah … there was that to do.

Once all of this is done I felt pretty good about myself and what I accomplished.  High fives for me.

Then I realized I still had to write the post.

And that, is what goes into creating a post.  Many hours, many screw ups, many solutions.  All done with with poise, elegance and a squirrel on my head.