Goodbye Sunrises, Hello Sunsets

Being partial to a sunset or two, I look forward to the days getting longer as we head towards the spring and summer months in London. As the sun rises earlier, it becomes more difficult for me to travel into the city in time to catch those softer more muted warm colours at dawn.

Not all is lost! As the sun sets later, that much sought after golden hour provides those richer warm colours for longer allowing me more time to capture those amazing sunsets in the city.

I took this photo in the summer of 2016 as the sun was disappearing and the dominant summer daylight was giving way to just a few hours of twilight.

Fujifilm X-T10 | XF18-55mm | 18mm | 140 Secs | f/9 | ISO200

Time for a project or two

It seems a bit late to talk about my projects for 2017 and there is a very good reason for this being I originally had no plans to do one. I recently attended some talks at The Photography Show 2017 and was inspired by some of the photographers that gave talks about their own photographic journeys and after seeing the value personal projects provided them, only then did I give it some serious thought.

Why start a photography project?

The thing about projects is that should be both defined and finite. A start and a finish with a pre-conceptualised or measurable outcome.

This is certainly not an exhaustive list of benefits that a photography project provides but they are what I believe some of the most important ones.

• Diversify your creative work and trying something new

• Experiment outside your comfort zone

• Motivation to get out and take photos when stuck in a rut

• Opportunity to hone your photographic skills

• An opportunity to share the work and engage with people

Project One: Well, you're reading it.

That's right, blogging can be a project too. Now I won't go into too much detail about why I started to blog here. Maybe I'll save that for another post. What I will say is that blogging is new for me and the only way I will ever realise my goals which are to improve my creative writing and put myself out there is to make sure I stick at it and ensure regular literary output that I hope someone will enjoy reading too. The theory being, the more I write, the easier it will become.

So, the plan is straight-forward enough. As I write this in late March, I want to target 3 to 4 posts per month or around one per week. With 9 more months of 2017, I feel a target of 30 more posts this year is a good target to aspire too. This may not sound a lot but along with a day job, family, being out and about taking photos, this seems to me like a reasonable target.

Project two - Create a time-lapse compilation

It's not been long since I had a try at my first short time-lapse which you can read about here: Behind the Lens: My First Time-lapse

So, I have decided to set myself a goal to create a time-lapse compilation of London cityscapes capturing different views, conditions and light. For the remainder of 2017 I plan to look into shooting/post-production techniques, tools to help to capture the images and to finish a matching soundtrack to suit the video.

My projects are about trying something new, sharing my work and experimenting outside my comfort zone with different formats. How they will go, we will have to wait and see but I will post updates throughout the year as to how I'm getting on.