Everyday Wellbeing

June 19, 2019

I thought that as a change from Street Photography I’d show something different on this blog. All the following images were taken over the last couple of weeks.

Every day I take photographs, it’s Everyday Photography; nothing special, purely for me. I have this urge to make images no matter what and no one escapes the gaze of my lens, that has to be bloody annoying. Putting on your makeup? I don’t care…

Taking a shower, need some privacy? Whatever…

I’m not attempting one of those 365 projects that people start. You know? A shot a day for a year and give up after a couple of weeks. This has been going on for years and years. Of course as a family with two young children and two dogs there’s usually something to photograph. To begin with I walk the dogs across the fields every morning before taking the kids to school. Generally I have my camera with me…

My computer hard drive is brimming with thousands of shots of the same fields and somewhere a dog in the frame, lord knows what I’m ever going to do with them all. The thing is that I enjoy the process, it’s therapeutic. You know all this New Age/Yoga/ Wellbeing/Meditation stuff? Live in the past and you’ll be depressed, live in the future and you’ll suffer from anxiety, live in the moment for a healthy mind. I completely agree with it. My advice is to buy a camera; you’ll live in the moment, observe every fleeting second, the nuances of your surroundings, those ethereal changes in the light. In short you’ll be in the ‘Now’. As a backup buy yourself a dog. Come rain or shine you will be out walking it, thus getting plenty of exercise. Or take up Street Photography, you’ll be using those legs much more than you can imagine and constantly in the moment as you observe the human condition.

I was going to title this a ‘A Walk on the Mild side’. We have had a huge amount of rain, my dad calls this month ‘flaming June’, it’s been that all right and not because of the unrelenting sun. We’ve actually had the heating switched on at home and so we won’t be hearing him say “What a scorcher!’ which he so often did when I was a child sat on the beach. We had a couple of days of good weather as I can show you here on one of our family walks;

Idyllic isn’t it? That was just one day, for the rest it’s been either raining or just plain dull. No stopping the kids though, they live in the ‘now’…

As photographers (I’m presuming you’ve taken my earlier advice and bought a camera!) we often crave that beautiful light, the blue hour or sunset/sunrise, but there’s much more to light than just that. Last Friday, whilst the children were at school, for some unfathomable reason Sam and I decided to take a long walk across the Wessex Ridgeway near Avebury with the dogs. We ended up covering around 6 miles and for the most part it rained, no, let’s not beat around the bush, it ‘pissed down’. In all fairness to the weather sometimes it slackened off to just torrential! As a point of interest the Ridgeway has been used as a thoroughfare/track of sorts for at least 5,000 years, so it's been around longer than nearby Stonehenge or Avebury Stone Circle. In total it runs for roughly 80 miles, I’d like to walk it’s entire length weather permitting, but as we know the English weather rarely permits anything. What it does permit for is some stunning light during and after the rain. Okay, for some I’m sure these shots might appear a bit gloomy and dull. However, the longer I photograph the more I appreciate different light, this kind of light in fact, the subtleties of which I hope you can also see;

In some respects those photographs appeal to me more than the sunny, contrasty ones from our ‘What a scorcher!’ day. I did say earlier that my everyday photography is essentially for me. Okay, time to go. I’ve got a really big ride tomorrow, not just for the Leica Biker Blog, but chiefly for me …