Back to it!

For the past month I seemed to have been bogged down in thinking about photography, reading about and writing about photography (applying for funding for projects). As important as each of those actions are they do not compare to taking and making photographs.

I had lost sight of project work and was wallowing in word documents. No longer! I made a point of getting back to it today, back to the frontline with cameras in hand. Bertha (my medium format Yashica) was out for the occasion, functioning as my mechanical muse and walking companion. Twelve shots later and I was home again, contented and refocused on image making. Keep an eye out for a Godzilla in high heels appearing in the stream shortly...

Tomorrow I am off to the Glens of Antrim, once again I will be focusing on the affected woodland areas and P.ramorum.

More soon. This new vigour will probably spill out here, Twitter and Instagram...

-PM

Week 15 - Aimless

Upon receiving the fifteenth brief from The Photographer's Gallery for the Street Photography Now challenge I was elated! "Wander aimlessly most of the time", set by Melanie Einzig. Great, we were given carte blanche for a week. As the days progressed and the entries started appearing on Flickr I had to sit and rethink the challenge. Primarily other photographers were focusing on pedestrians walking, normally, into or out of some wittily composed scenario.

This was not enough for me. Wandering aimlessly can be a meditative state, a vibrant pseudo-somnambulistic experience where you are led by instinct or impulse. Maybe I have spent too long musing on the Japanese philosophy of 'mono no aware', which celebrates the transience of things. Thus, photographing whilst aimlessly walking meant I was capturing fragments of a personal experience and producing a visual record of how I was led, and where I wandered.

-PM