Hello. It's been a while. ONE YEAR and SEVEN MONTHS since I last blogged anything to be almost exact. So uhh, what's been going on? Why did I go dark? Why am I blogging about it again now? Well without giving you my life story, and 'trauma dumping' on you, some answers.
First off, I took, and to a degree am still taking, a sabbatical from photography for a while. I stopped using Flickr a while back because I felt like the community was dying off and the group of people I used to chat to on there were slowly melting away. It felt less and less like a place for photographers and more and more like a money making business venture for it's new owners and the benefits of FlickrPro were becoming less beneficial to me. My page is still live but I haven't logged in for years. I also felt like Instagram became less about sharing photos and more about having a massive follower count and farming 'engagement' regardless of the content, and my engagement was half what it used to be before the algorithm changes, so I killed my photo IG. I keep my personal one, but that's more about just following and keeping up with friends than it is about sharing meaningful photography. So to a degree I felt like my photography didn't really have anywhere to go. I shot rolls of film that I just saved to my hard drive and didn't share anywhere. And if I wasn't sharing them, then what was I doing? Why was I taking photos? Combine that with my next problem:
I brought a house and relocated last year! I'm now Essex based as opposed to Midlands based before, and for the most part it's been a positive move. However the house needs work doing, even now a year odd later, it's a long story, so that keeps me busy. Compounding that my job changed about 2 years ago and I suddenly became alot busier for a little bit more money... both these factors meant that I found myself with less time to focus on photography and blogging, and less free time in general really. And I had to balance work with play. Meaning one of the casualties of that was that I didn't have the energy or effort to put into playing around with 70 year old cameras or taking the latest reloadable film camera out for a spin after being at work all week. I just wanted to chill and (cheeky pop of the new side hustle blog...) play video games!
That being said, it's not like I didn't shoot any photography at all last year. I took a break in September last year and did a solo tour of South Wales into Aberystwyth for a week and took a whole bunch of photos along the way. It was great to just be out travelling with a camera again and I really enjoyed having a week of free time to just get up, do what I want and not have to be anywhere specific! Here's a handful of my favourites from the trip:
And you can check out the rest of my shots in the South Wales & Aberystwyth travel gallery. Go to St. David's and Tenby but I wouldn't make an extra special effort to visit Haverfordwest if I was you. I've already mentally planned my next trip; Wrexham, Betws-y-Coed, Conwy and Llandudno! Look out for the North Wales travel gallery! Here's a couple from the film in my OM10 if you were curious:
So why am I suddenly back now? Well, I'm not about to promise or commit myself to monthly blog posts... but the relocation has settled down a bit, although most of my photography stuff is still in boxes... and I hope to be in a position this year to travel more in my job (let's see how that develops!!) which opens avenues to get creative with a camera. I still haven't found a platform that replaces Flickr or Instagram and if you are reading this and you know one that works well for you, by all means drop me an email right H E R E and I'll 100% look into it, but I do feel like I want to get back into photography and blogging again. Even if that means just buying old cameras and playing around with them! So who knows. Maybe I'll post this and you won't see anything again, maybe this is the soft relaunch of my photography blog. Watch this space. I'm going to Scotland next month...