It is customary every January 14th to mark the anniversary of me starting this site with a little post. Last year I almost missed the day completely. This year, I finally missed it by a day (all the more infuriating because I popped onto the site yesterday to look at some images, realised the anniversary was imminent, but for some reason didn’t realise we were already that far into January. I know, I’m an idiot).
It’s been a very quiet year here at Creative Splurges. In fact, I only published two sets of images the entire year, a couple of months apart from each other. The first set was some time in the making, a bit of self-therapy as well as an attempt to explain why the site had been quiet for so long.
The second set, posted in September, was at the time an earnest attempt to get back into the flow of things after a lot of downtime, although obviously it didn’t turn out that way.
It’s been a very interesting and hectic fifteen months to be honest, none of which has really been conducive to photographing much and writing relatively long-form articles alongside them. I took on a more senior role at work at the end of September 2017, which in early 2018 resulted in a change of hours and less free time in the evenings when I always used to edit photos. As I mentioned in my Family post last summer, we also lost my father-in-law at the end of 2017, which meant a lot of 2018’s gatherings were family affairs with minimal photo opportunities (at least unless you wanted this site to have nothing but photographs of my family).
Later in 2018, my wife and I started looking to buy our own home after 12 years of renting other people’s properties. That culminated in us buying a house days before Christmas and moving over the very first few days in January. To give you an idea of how long we were living on our old flat, it’s the place where I founded Creative Splurges back in 2011.
The upside of all this is that we didn’t just move house, we moved to a whole new area in the countryside with so many new photographic opportunities to explore. Not far from us there’s a steam railway, a viaduct (sadly those two aren’t connected), some animal sanctuaries, and a ruddy great national park. So although I expect this site will be quiet for a little while yet as we continue to unpack and settle in, I am resolutely determined to get back into this hobby in 2019, which I know was also my goal going into both 2018 and 2017.
I’ve not been entirely quiet in 2018. If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll have seen I have been reasonably prolific in shooting with my iPhone over the last year, which has expanded into doing full edits on-device in Photoshop Express. Give me a follow over there in the meantime, especially if you like cats. I take a lot of cat photos.
It is also customary in these anniversary posts to share a selfie that represents my progress in the year, always taken in the same place. Since I no longer have access to that mirror things will have to change in the future, but for now it’s probably more fitting to share a Photoshop Express-edited iPhone selfie since that is actually a bit more representative of the work I’ve been doing over the last twelve months.
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Creative Splurges 