Begin
It’s always hard to begin. At least I find it daunting. Luckily this is somewhat of a false beginning, in a good way. I’ve had various blogs and journals, and repositories for my photo stories in various places on the web over the years, so I’m first of all going to collate some of these here, and then keep adding to them.
If you’re curious, I’m a photographer of the fine art persuasion. Maybe I’ll dig into what that actually means sometime soon.
If you’re curious, I’m a photographer of the fine art persuasion. Maybe I’ll dig into what that actually means sometime soon. It’s a vague term, made more vague by some somewhat pejorative interpretations.
Until about 8 years ago, I worked first as a professional graphic designer (15ish years), then I switched back to my first love, photography, which I studied at Uni many many years ago. My first year as a portrait photographer was, seemingly rarely, actually profitable.
Unfortunately, just after that, I developed a fairly disruptive chronic illness, which I’ll likely talk about in another post. Anyway, the treatment was almost as bad as the illness and – long story short – it halted all the good progress I’d made.
I stopped working in portraiture and eventually fell back in to fine art photography. Primarily what I like to call documentary landscape. Learning to live with my new limits has been tough to be honest. Even the physical act of writing this is causing my hand to cramp up. But I feel like (pandemic aside) I’m in a good place now; to enable myself to make the work I want to make and tell the stories I want to tell.
A big part of that storytelling process is going to be through my YouTube channel, Chronically Photographic, and the video above is a statement of intent of sorts. Or an accountability statement. I plan to make videos about my process and the gear I use, and the projects and places that tweak my interest a little. The video above was a little precursor to what I’ve been doing since, but is a decent intro to who I am and the kind of story teller I aspire to be.
A small part of what I talk about will be how my illness affects my work, and my gear. And also what certain gear might be like for you if you have similar issues to me, for example. The focus is going to be the pure work, but this will be a sub-plot, if you like.
I’m currently transferring my online life over to this Squarespace site mostly from an old Wordpress blog. I also have a very effective place for my photo stories over at exposure.co but it’s far too expensive and complicated to try and get everything that I want out of that one service. So I’m biting the bullet over Xmas, so that I can be up and running in ‘22. Providing ‘22 is a little more sane than ‘21…
I have a print sales shop in the works too. Once that’s done, I’ll feel like I’m freed up to actually make the work I care about.
First though, I’m going to transfer some of my old blog posts over, so there may be some posts with the same date on them. Won’t last long though. Drop in, say hello, have a look at the few videos I currently have on my channel, and hopefully when I start posting my serious work up here, it’ll be of some interest!
Me
yeah soooo…. This is me. 3 years ago. I’m actually a bit greyer even than that now, and longer of beard. One of the top things on my list is to face the lens again, and get myself a more representative self portrait.