Moving on

Fin stagram

It’s time to move on from Instagram. There are lots of reasons, but there’s not much to gain going through them all. Most important perhaps, was that I felt wildly hypocritical talking to my kids about the problems of social media whilst spending an unhealthy amount of time on it myself. I ditched Facebook years ago and deleted Twitter a few months back. Each time I do this it feels great. It turns out I rather like being a quitter.

I’m hoping to encourage a few people to follow me over onto this newsletter, hello to those who found me here in the last few days. Perhaps I’ll even get to meet a few of you in real life one day. It’s refreshing to be letting go of something I didn't enjoy to start something entirely new.

Rather than just quit overnight, I’m using this imminent exit as an excuse to take a look at my unfinished and unpublished work from 2024, and I thought I'd share a selection here as well. It’s been a difficult year to be running a small business, and keeping the gallery going has occupied more of my time and my brain than I would like. The pile of new images on the hard drive has grown, the pile of printed and completed work has not.

This somewhat self indulgent exercise is a useful reminder that it has been, in some ways at least, a fruitful year. It’s giving me some hope for 2025, and that seems a good way to round out the year. Below, some pictures made between January and March. I’ll post some more over the coming days.

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January
Surprise snow on the South Downs, a landscape reduced.

The cyclist in the distance here is a very old friend of mine. My bike riding companion since I was about 16. On this day we ran into each other up here by chance, the only two people out enjoying these familiar hills in unfamiliar weather.

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February
A month that was all about swimming and starlings. About thirteen hours in the sea over four weeks, with many hundreds of pictures to look through each day. Most of them are nonsense, but the little moments of serendipity are marvellous.

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March
Rain, more rain, and floods. Puddles became ponds, woodland became lakeland. I usually enjoy seeing the landscape transformed by unusual conditions, but this is a worrying trend in our winter weather.

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Thanks for reading. You can find part two below.