Not dead yet

I know. You have been wondering haven’t you?

It has been said –by me on my ‘About Bear’ page as it happens– that
“I do enjoy the creative outlet of my photography–it’s just more often in sporadic bursts of relative enthusiasm rather than a continuous drive.“

But five months, without even feeling like I want to be bothered with taking the camera with me anywhere, is a long time even for me. It’s a combination of things. Busier than I used to be, health, amplified anxiety about unnecessary human contact, just too tired by everything going on in the wider world to have the mental energy to even think about it…

But I know I need ‘I want to take some photos’, which is very different to ‘I should take some photos‘. Although I am aware this blog was sitting here not being updated, I just didn’t have any enthusiasm for doing anything about it.

Anyway, we went down to the beach yesterday, and I wanted to take some pictures of the rocks down there. I had some ideas for images I would want to use, for an article on the website that we’ve started for my wife and her potter pal’s ceramics business, Rockpool Potters.

If you want to pop over to the site as it is, it’s at rockpoolpotters.com, but it is very much early days for content on there yet, and I’m posting this before I’ve created the article I had in mind for that. I wanted to get images of some of the rocks, the quartz veins created in them, shapes of the erosion, and perhaps some of the animal life.

I know my camera, but I was still rusty in using it. Uncertain and temporarily unfamiliar, leaving things set when I didn’t mean to and forgetting how to set the things I did want.

After I had settled down a bit, and tired the dog out enough with chasing a ball across the sand, I had a quieter moment to compose some stuff I now felt like taking, instead of just the purely illustrative pre-set ideas I had gone down there with. For the illustrative type, I wanted the colours, but I reverted to black and white for my own.

Start of a photographically productive phase? Don’t know. But it felt good to be wanting to take some photos.

And of course, a few experimental impressionistic exposures.

As usual, you can click on the photos to get a full tab version for a closer look.