Eleven Years

Whilst it’s long been a tradition for me to mark the anniversary of setting up this site with a post on January 14th, occasionally reflecting on the year gone and setting out my goals for the year ahead (depending on if I managed to pull together a ‘year in review’ post that covered all that stuff already), more recently it’s become tradition for me to pad out said posts with excuses for why I’ve failed to meet any of those goals.

Things were looking up at the start of 2021. I had used the first few months of lockdown in 2020 to go through my sizeable backlog of unedited images and prepare them for display, and even managed to get a handful of them posted before the year was out. However, as previously documented, the end of 2020 saw the arrival of a small child into our lives – and it turns out, those things take effort.

As such, I only managed to put out two posts in 2021, one small one about a trip to our local wood, and the other covering my 2019 trip to Bluebell Railway, which is one of my favourite sets in recent memory – partly for the quality of the images, and partly because I managed to get some decent shots with a camera I’d hardly used before after making the rookie mistake of forgetting to bring any SD cards with me.

I had every intention of getting out more posts – I have a decent number of images now edited and just needing some explanatory words to go with them – but sleep deprivation and lack of habit counted against me.

Despite still being a heavy iPhone photographer (it’s much easier to grab a phone when a child is doing something cute), I did take a few DSLR photos in 2021 too. Mostly these weren’t that exciting – they were either just photos of my kid, or our family holiday in the summer, or a few photos of Christmas, but last May I did also find the time and inspiration for some experimental photography in my garden, the sort of thing I’ve not done in a long while, and I’m looking forward to bringing you those. With the new images, however, the challenge is finding the time to sit down and edit them.

One of the advantages of having a blog anniversary in January is being able to plan for the year ahead in a New Year’s resolution sort of way. Ultimately, you won’t be surprised to read that my intentions are to get back into the habit of sitting down and writing posts of an evening (or even perhaps on the train) now my kid has a reasonably decent sleep schedule.

With the handful of photos I’ve taken in the last year I am reminded that I truly miss doing proper DSLR photography, so my other goal is developing a decent way to go for exploratory treks with both child and camera attached to me. Or I suppose persuading my wife to do the child-carrying, although the challenge there is silencing my over-active guilt gland.

Historically I’ve always closed out these posts with a selfie that represents the progress I’ve made in the last year. Over the last couple of years that’s varied a bit as I’ve spent much of my time stopping and starting over and not necessarily progressing in my photographic ability, and I’ve been sharing perhaps more relevant selfies, marking my progress in life itself. So to that end, here is another couple of photographs I’ve taken of myself. As you’d expect, they’re both taken by an iPhone.

This second image merely marks the fact that when I’m editing photos and writing for this site I need to wear glasses now. Time comes for us all eventually.

Happy New Year and, as always, thank you for reading.

Rob