Family was the priority this month as we spent 28 days between June and early July visiting close relatives who we hadn’t seen face-to-face since February 2020. Intentional photographic opportunities were therefore few and far between. However, I managed three two-hour sessions when I was able to get out and be creative.

Despite lockdowns coming to an end, we’ve been experiencing one of the wettest and coldest Mays on record! While I’m not a fair-weather photogapher, these conditions can affect one’s motivation on certain days - and they did! However, I have been out a few times relatively locally, re-estabishing my practice and the necessary planning that goes with that.

It’s over three months since my last Blog and I’ve been acutely aware of this first break in my monthly posting since its inception in January 2020. There are two reasons for this, reflected in its title:

Last month’s theme of “Isolation…” became the challenge I thought it might. While some images came naturally, others felt more “forced”, and overall I was less happy with the collection than previous blogs. My main learning is that for a subject like this, given the number of trips I make in a month, it would be better to work up such a complex theme to do it justice over a longer period of time. So, this month I decided not have a theme - hence the title “Unfettered…”. I felt liberated, and it was one of my best months photographically, technically, compositionally and motivationally:

I knew this month’s theme of Isolation, prompted by the onset of a second Covid wave, would be challenging! Even though I embraced its meaning as positive (solitude, privacy etc), neutral (remoteness, withdrawal etc) as well as negative (confinement, desolation etc), it’s a complex concept to portray in a two-dimensional image. While I searched for relevant compositions, I sometimes felt I was “forcing the issue” or manufacturing a scene that stretched the meaning of the concept…

Most of my blogs and past projects have been centred around places or news. This month I wanted a different challenge: to evoke emotion in myself and anyone viewing these images. The theme of “Mysterious” emerged, variously defined as having an atmosphere of strangeness/secrecy; enigmatic; mystical; exciting curiosity, amazement or awe. These 6 images were selected from 21 taken during the month:

We sadly had to cancel our annual June pilgramage to Loggos in Paxos, so I set the intention to revisit selected images taken in the past two years and reprocess the RAW files in a different way. The objectives of this were to a) use my latest Lightroom skills to portray a new perspective on each image, experimenting with less conventional processes, and b) provide a small collection of images that give some sense of what this place means to me.

This delayed blog was planned to be about our recent trip to South Wales to explore its walks and photographic possibilities. However, the escalating world-wide pandemic and our temporarily changed way of life increasingly made me feel uneasy about posting another set of images as if nothing was happening around us all. It’s too big to ignore!