Life sure does have a habit of morphing and changing whether we want it to or not.  Here I am in Australia and I’ve just got a new job back landscaping that I’m enjoying.  Thanks to my mum, I now dabble in a bit of lawn bowls and I’ve also joined a camera club because I hoped to understand a bit more of the technical aspect of photography, so I threw myself into the activities to help me improve. 

It’s strange listening to people who understand how their camera works and have knowledge of the principles of photography because I’ve basically spent five years making it up as I went along.

It was Covid where I first turned my camera to its manual settings and I spent the next two years getting up close and personal with flowers and insects.  As a landscaper, you appreciate the changing seasons and that was compounded when I began to spend time in a garden trying to capture its beauty, and not trying to maintain the lawns or keep on top of the weeds, like I would at work.

I felt safe in the garden focusing on the micro rather than the macro and I felt embarrassed that I didn’t have the skills to capture a whole landscape, like the proper photographers I followed on Instagram.

So, I did a three-day workshop with a couple of those skilled landscape photographers and it turned out that I needed plenty of pointers but I needed to be less focused on faithfully trying to recreate the scene in front of me.  I developed my own style over the next few years and began to stop replicating and strived to convey something in my images.  I could use photography to express my emotions at the instant the shutter on my camera snapped open.  I began to try and tell a story as I captured moments in my life, that went beyond what I was looking at and focused on how I felt.

That definitely sounds like a whole bunch of artistic wank and I assure you that I annoy myself with grandiose explanation of the simple act of taking a picture.

I was lucky, because we had our campervan and had the option of touring the British Isles and Europe at a slower pace where both Kerry and I could indulge our artistic pursuits in a world that felt like it was speeding up with each passing year.

I’m writing this on Good Friday and I’m keenly aware that this exact time last year we’d just spent our first night in Ireland and had another six weeks of travel ahead of us.  Two years ago, we were likely crossing over the Alps and we heading for Italy and another month in the sun skirting the Mediterranean coastline.

Somewhere around this time, because I was working on my photo editing skills, I discovered I could combine multiple images on Photoshop and really go to town trying to express myself. I wasn’t just conveying a moment with these images; I could totally just make shit up.  My only restrictions were I had to use my images, but I’d probably taken over two hundred thousand shots in the last five years, so there’s no shortage of material to work with.

And so, we return to the subject of work because if it wasn’t for the money I would create digital art and travel for the rest of my days. I was recently between jobs and with all that time spare, I surprised myself with my creative output over a three-week period.  Those images are scattered throughout this blog.

They might not appeal to people, I might never sell a thing but they are my images, they are part of me.  Here I go getting all conceited and pompous again, but in this era of AI the human experience has never been more important.  We might not have huge data centres feeding us information but we can still create, develop and learn too. 

In fact, we have an advantage because we live, and that means we feel.