It occurs to me, with little recent travel and an grim immediate travel future, that I have forgotten the habit of photographing for myself.

Dangerous stuff.

I feel strongly that neglecting to take images for yourself leads to a real loss of personal vision, style and creative drive. Getting good at one thing only or many things from only one perspective blinkers your skill set.

This quiet winter, I will have to take things in hand.

There are personal projects from existing work like the long neglected coffee table book on Japan, some prints of the same and more general subjects and there is always the eternal quest to perfect techniques, especially lighting.

My best route to creative balance would be to do some landscape sets, fungi photos (lots around at the moment), portraits of friends and family and some sports as able.

On one hand, I would love it if work kept me so busy, things like this did not come to mind, but on the other hand maybe this is a good thing. Maybe I need to balance my creative life better. I consider myself on call, but long distance travel is not an issue (where I live is 45 mins from the coast, 10 mins from primeval rain forrest or marshlands and 1 hr from rocky mountain landscape).

The other point, no less important, is that I cannot post 95% of what I take for the school, so I risk starving my posts of supporting pictures. Can’t have that.

Effort required, desire re-kindled, result guaranteed.