... blog post:
It has been, lately, a time for quiet contemplation and inner reflection. Thoughts about new photographic directions, old endings and new beginnings if you like. Conclusions about what really matters.
As Arthur James Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, once said "Nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all." and I get it. The trick is to focus on those few things.
Photographically speaking, I have had many interests. At what time or another I have been into (and out of again) photographing wild animals, flowers, architecture, autumn foliage, bygones including heritage steam and landscapes.
Now I have taken these interests seriously more than once. Indeed I have cycled through them, monotonously, many times and indeed in many styles over the years becoming less enamoured by them every cycle through. Everything has been done in these areas by so many people, including myself, it's boring and clichéd. Indeed there are many famous photogs out there who have been specialists in a particular field for so long who don't even realise that their work has made them a parody of themselves.
So where have all these reflections brought me? Well, what really mattered was to find a another genre of photography, a new direction, rather than start on the same old cycle of stuff, whilst retaining my current walkabout-snapshot aesthetic. So I decided that my next focus would be on places. Using the power of a photograph to evoke a time and location that is to say.
Seeing some of my recent outings, I would say this new direction had already chosen me. It was the direction in which I was already headed, I just needed to look up and recognise it.
To quote the fictional Everett Hitch, of Appaloosa fame said, "Life has a way of making the foreseeable that which never happens and the unforeseeable that which your life becomes". So here's to loads of new photographs of places and the adventures associated with making them, a direction I did not see my photography taking, but am really pleased it has.