July

It’s time for a sudden realisation that it’s somehow August already, summer is most of the way over and we’re already well on the way to shorter days, colder weather and, eventually, Christmas. Okay, that might be a bit of an exaggeration – after all, I’ve still got a summer holiday to take, and it’s not like the the weather is cooling off any. But even so, somehow July seems to have been and gone in the blink of an eye and I almost didn’t notice it.

Despite this, I managed to get a few posts out in July, somehow managing to pay attention enough to the weeks slipping by to ensure I got some content written up and published, although I did manage to let two weeks of the month slip by before getting anything done.

The first post of the month was Zebras, Giraffes and Rhinos, Oh My, a poorly titled look at the final batch of images I took on a trip to Woburn way back in 2012. Despite being the last of the images, these are some of my favourites from the trip, with the exception perhaps of some of the big cat pictures I released first. Inevitably the post was a bit of a menagerie, but I quite liked it like that – hence where the title came from. In a similar fashion to my post of images taken at Mercedes-Benz World, my tweet mentioning the collection was retweeted by Woburn’s own Twitter account, although on this occasion it didn’t lead to any retweets and only a few favourites, and not a huge amount of hits, but hey-ho, it’s nice to think that someone from Woburn at least looked at them (they used to run an annual photography competition but there seems to be no mention of it on their website currently).

The next post of the month was one that had been saved up for a while. More Random Gems featured a selection of the one-off images I’ve taken over the last year or so that simply didn’t fit in any other post. As I mentioned in the post, for a while I used The Daily Photo to post these images as exclusives, but I shut that down last November, removing one of the few outlets for these images (the other one I use a lot is social media; at least a few of the images from the post has been posted to Facebook and Twitter a while before). Unexpectedly quite a few people liked the post, but as ever I’m not sure what to read into that (interesting side note: Boscastle Pottery, one of my favourite posts, only has three WordPress ‘likes’, but has almost 700 views, making it the most viewed post other than that Freshly Pressed one. ‘Likes’ seem to be a poor indicator of interest).

The last post of the month was a little more unusual. The only shooting I did in July was down at Canon’s UK headquarters for an experience day where I was able to play about with some nice, expensive toys and shoot some admittedly familiar game. Going into the day I hadn’t actually shot anything in over a month and was definitely feeling rusty, To go from nothing to shooting fast-moving animals shoulder to shoulder with lots of keen photographers was a challenge, especially in the heat we had that day, but I quickly got up to speed. That said, I definitely need to get back into practise. It’s amazing how quickly the time without shooting can sneak upon you.

I don’t really know what next month will hold yet. I’ve not got any shooting planned so it’s likely I’ll be spending some time going through some of the big old posts I’ve yet to finish going through (4,000 images from my summer holiday in 2012… that might take a while). All the while I’m trickling towards my 250th post on this blog and although I don’t think I’ll be marking it like I did my 100th post I’d like it to at least be some fresh content rather than some photos I’ve taken two years to get round to editing. We’ll see – that isn’t likely to come around until September.

Thanks, as ever and always, for reading.
Rob