November

November has been a bit of a lopsided month. It started out pretty strongly but my amount of posts tapered off towards the end of the month. This is kind of expected to be honest; November is a month of birthdays in my family so I don’t often have a lot of time for writing. I have even less time for shooting it seems, as I don’t think I’ve taken any photographs in weeks. The month’s posts were from October at the more recent, or the October before it at the earliest.

The first post in November was London in the Evening. the post was something I hadn’t done in a while: a photography trip out with a friend. It was something we’d trying to achieve for a while, and when we realised the only time we were free was from around sunset one evening. This was great as it allowed us to meet at St Paul’s and photograph it as the foreground to a great sunset. We also had a great opportunity to try out some street photography as the city got darker. This was the day before I got the 24-105mm lens I recently added to my collection, so there was no gushing of image quality in the post, but even so I was very pleased with a lot of the images I got. One of them has already made it onto my RedBubble store, soon I’ll pick my favourite St Paul’s sunset shot to add too.

My next post, posted not quite a week later, was from a trip taken a whole year earlier, on a visit to Woburn Safari Park. At the start of October I was holed up in my study at home whilst my kitchen was being refurbished, and of the 2,500 images I sifted through in that downtime, 1,000 of them were from the Woburn trip. I’m releasing these images in batches over time, and the first of these was The Big Cats of Woburn. It made a change to photograph big cats for once instead of the domestic ones I usually shoot. It also felt good to finally get some images from deep in my backlog posted, and I think a bunch of them came out pretty well.

Five days later I posted my most recent photography trip, a visit to the Moscow State Circus. This was one of my first field trips my my new 24-105mm so I used it exclusively at the show, and even left its predecessor in my collection – my old 18-135mm – at home. As the conditions at the big top were very similar to the times I’ve visited the Greenwood theatre, I shot the whole thing in manual mode, and given our slightly obstructed view I think I got some really nice, sharp images out of it. I’m certainly looking forward should I ever get asked back to the Greenwood again.

My final post of the month, Random London, was my first true, albeit short, trip with my 24-105, wandering around some familiar bits of London on my way home one evening. I fired off some quick HDR shots and some impromptu street photography, something that could easily be considered as test shoots for a bigger project. You know, if they were done by someone who was far better at planning than I. It’s another set of images from my new lens that I’m really really happy with, and it’s also a set very much in line with my other trip to London posted this month, and tyne sort of photos I’d like to be taking more of.

Normally at this point in my monthly reflections I start talking about stats, readership growth and how many people ‘liked’ any given post, but I’m considering not doing that any more. Whilst writing up October’s review, I realised I didn’t care much for it; it doesn’t really matter to me how many people read, like and comment on my posts. I’m not doing this for anyone but myself. If anyone feels inclined enough to comment on a post, or like a post enough to have a browse around the rest of this site, then great (and the sudden and very welcome influx of comments compared to previous months did give me pause to reconsider) – but it ultimately doesn’t really matter. Unless I suddenly get a raft of publicity and a significant boost in hits, then it isn’t worth mentioning.

This is also normally the point where I mention the Daily Photo. Usually I’ll say it’s continuing unabated – in fact, I think I use those exact words most of the time – but this time, it isn’t. Around half way through the month, I unceremoniously put it on hiatus after missing several consecutive days’ posts. Frankly it had become a chore to maintain, and the payoff was just not worth the effort. Shutting the Daily Photo down is something I’d thought about doing several times over the last year or so. Lately I’d quietly decided I’d probably properly shut it down at the end of the year, but ultimately I didn’t make it that far. For now, I consider the blog on hiatus rather than shut down permanently, but time will tell if it’ll ever come back.

I’d also normally at this point talk about the month ahead. And so I’m going to. December is usually a bit more of an active month for me because I have my Christmas break from work that gives me time to edit and shoot more. Right now I don’t have too many plans for shooting, but I’m hoping – and for now it’s a hope – that I’ll take some massive strides towards clearing the backlog that still dates back to late 2012. I proved back in October that once I hit my stride I can edit thousands of photographs in a week, so we’ll see how it goes. I also don’t have the Daily Photo to distract me, which will help.

Thanks, as always, for reading.
Rob