Nine Years

One of my few remaining traditions here at Creative Splurges is a little birthday post every January 14th, marking the anniversary of the day I started this site. Although I have left it out to pasture a little over the last few years, this site continues to be a drive for me to get back into my hobby of photography. In last year’s post I made grand sweeping promises about how moving to the countryside in a new area was going to lead to all sorts of new photographic opportunities and with it a resurgence of this site. As has already been well documented, not much of 2019 really went to plan. I did still take a photos whilst out on trips – I even edited a few – but editing photos and writing is something I’m still struggling with. I’ve also not had as many opportunities for photography as I was originally intending. This is something I’m determined to get more disciplined at in 2020.

Things are already looking up: last year I missed the anniversary by a day, and the year before I only thought about it on the anniversary itself – this year I am sitting here writing this with a few days left to spare. There is still work to be done, it takes effort for things I’m so out of practise at to become habit again.

It is also traditional for me to accompany these anniversary posts with a ‘selfie’ that is representative of my year in photography, the theory being that my progress as a photographer can be tracked by a single summary of all I’d learned. Obviously with big gaps of not much photography, simply not going backwards is an achievement in itself.

However, much like previous years, I have been spending a lot of time using my smartphone for photography. Indeed, you’ll find me relatively active on Instagram even as this site gets few updates. So I will once again be posting a progress ‘selfie’, but it is perhaps more reflective of the progress of smartphone photography hardware and software rather than my own skill.
It seems that every year at this stage I close out by stating intentions of getting into better habits with my photographing, and more importantly editing and posting. At this stage, there seems little point in changing that tradition.

Thanks, as always, for reading.