It all starts here… — Not Quite There

I first picked up a camera during my teenage years as a close friend of mine was a keen photographer who was planning to take photography at university however, it wasn’t until my early 20s that I actually bought a camera of my own. It may not surprise you to read that I (like many before and after me) started with an entry level Canon DSLR coupled with a basic kit lens. Now this camera served me well and did the job for a good seven or eight years, sticking by my side as I tried various genres of photography. Then in my early 30s I discovered film photography, which once again I appreciate won’t come as a surprise to many of you given this was around the time that film photography became trendy again. For a few years I fall deep into the rabbit hole of film and even dabbled with home development for a while and although I loved the process and the results, I struggled with the fact I had to send the film off to be developed, scanned and returned to me. It’s also worth noting the experiment that was developing at home resulted in a fair bit of heartbreak, especially after loosing a roll I took on the day my partner and I got engaged! So in an attempt to replicate all the things I loved about film photography in a digital form, I found my beloved Fujifilm X-T4.

The X-T4 was the perfect tool for the job, it felt (and looked) like a traditional film camera, I could use various film recipes to replicate my favour film stocks and most importantly I had the option to shoot JPEG + RAW, so I could cut out the editing process but still have a photo that matched the look I was aiming for. I’ll dive deeper into which film stocks and film recipes I used in another blog post.

I felt like I had finally found my stride, I had started to focus on a particular genre of photography, develop my own style and build something resembling a portfolio. It was at this point I found out that we were expecting our first child! This was obviously fantastic news and my mind was overflowing with various photography projects that I wanted to embark on to document the first months and years of their lives. However, fatherhood changed my life is ways I could never have expected. Although I managed to capture some really nice images over the first two years or so, I lost my connection with photography. I found myself more often than not leaving my camera behind when I went out and on the rare occasion I remembered to take it with me, it stayed in my bag. My focus and attention was needed elsewhere.

This brings us to the present day. I found myself itching for that creative outlet again, feeling motivated to carve out time to make photos again rather than sitting on the couch watching endless YouTube videos documenting other photographers going out and creating incredible work. Fortunately around this time I found myself having to travel to Edinburgh for work so I decided to pack my camera and set aside some time to walk the streets and reconnect with photography. It was as if the stars had aligned. I saw glimpses of the “old me” in the reflections of the windows. I started to feel a sense of creativity, motivation and peacefulness that I hadn’t felt in years by this point.

So with this renewed motivation I wanted to have somewhere to share this journey of self discovery without the distraction of chasing “likes”, being pushed towards short form content and pleasing the algorithmic gods. Somewhere I could share my thoughts and experiences at a slower pace. I’ll be using this space to publish blog posts as a digital journal for myself and build a body of work that I can be proud of. I don’t expect any of my photos to be groundbreaking or fine pieces of art, the simple act of making photos and reflecting on them is enough for me. And on that note, I’ll wrap my first blog post up, without committing to posting on a schedule, well not yet anyway. I’m just Not.Quite.There.