Anyone who has seen my Instagram feed will know that I’m not averse to using the occasional musical allusion. The title of this blog is unashamedly borrowed from one of my favourite folk singers of all time, who like so many died way too young. I am of course referring to the wonderful Sandy Denny. However, my love of music, and my distant attempts to become a professional musician, are another story. On this occasion the reference is to the question of what on earth I’ve been doing since returning from Scotland some six weeks ago?
Although I didn’t take a vast number of photographs in Scotland (it was after all meant to be a holiday for both of us) I still had a lot of editing to do and of course I posted a blog about my trip. In an exciting turn of events I was also asked to submit an article about my trip with images to a well know photography magazine. More on that if and when it gets published. I also had a number of requests for prints from the trip after I posted the gallery of images on this website. Making the perfect print takes a lot of time. I produce several test prints before the final finished version. For the most recent one that I posted out this week I did seven subtly different A4 prints before printing the final A3 version. I’ve made the test prints available for sale at £25 each. They are printed on a variety of papers and all have tiny differences (a lift of the shadows here, a warming of the colour there). Each is a perfectly acceptable print in its own right but would not have worked as well when printed large. If you’re interested in buying one it is entitled “Blackhouse, North Uist” and can been seen in the Scottish Isles gallery under Portfolios.
In another strange and fortunate twist of events I received an email from someone a few weeks ago asking if it was possible to buy a print of a photograph I had taken of a house that he had recently bought. A friend of his had seen my photograph. I couldn’t think which image he was referring to and eventually I realised that it was on my Instagram feed. He also asked if he could see more examples of photographs I had taken in the west of England. At this point I realised that I had to knuckle down to a job I’ve been putting off since I built this website. I needed to pull together a gallery of images from the part of the world that I shoot the most - the West Country. Or Wessex.
I have hundreds if not thousands of images captured in my locality. I put together a selection in a folder where I kept removing photographs, adding new ones until imposter syndrome kicked in and I decided none of them were good enough. However, requests to see more images from my West Country collection forced me to get on with it. The result is my latest gallery - Wessex Landscapes. Is it perfect? Far from it. Is it the finished article? No it’s not. I’ll continue to remove images and add new ones as time goes by. And with such a rich seam on my doorstep that shouldn’t be too difficult should it? Well for the moment it might be.
As I type this England is one week into a month’s full lockdown. We’ve been instructed to minimise travel but that we can go outside for exercise or recreation. Again they use the word “minimise” to restrict exercise and recreation but that does seem to be open to interpretation. So I’ve decided that whilst I couldn’t justify driving to a location I can walk for an indeterminate amount of time, just as I did in the first lockdown. Last weekend I captured some really pleasing images on the Plains a couple of miles from the village, just on the edge of Parsonage Down Nature Reserve where I am a volunteer. You’ll find these at the end of the Wessex Landscapes gallery. But I’m also once again trying some still life images inside the house, hence the thumbnail photograph that accompanies this blog! Maybe that should the subject for my next gallery?