As is my wont, I am forever driven by my misguided sense of obligation. I took the first ride of 2025 on the motorbike because I’d just paid my insurance and felt like I better get some use out of it. I opened Lightroom for the first time in a year back in December because I saw the charge on my bank account and thought I better see what’s going on in there. It feels like my camera has done more miles being put in different places in one room of the house than it’s done outside the house. I’d take it out now and then, take a few photos of birds and post them to Instagram.

Then I’d remember what a cesspool of humanity social media is and renew my resolve to give up on it forever. If my count is correct, this will be the fourth or fifth time I’ve entirely given up on Instagram. The rest (facebook, twitter) went years ago and I never looked back. Instagram remained only because it was an easy (and only) outlet to be somewhat creative in. Quick photo dumps from my camera while I was out. The odd photo from my phone. A video here and there, but very sparingly. I paid too much attention to the bad on the platform and found it increasingly difficult to find the content I wanted to reach my eyeballs. No politics, no religion, no rage baiting, basically no reminder whatsoever what a superbly troubled world it is we’re all living in right now.

So for the first time in quite a long time, I just picked up my camera and went out with the sole purpose of wandering around a bit and taking a few photos. I didn’t even bring a second (or third) lens with me, such was my intricately planned dedication to being appearing totally casual about the whole thing.

It helped a lot that the sun came out, something we haven’t seen much of since ohh, 2023 was it? The lens of choice was the manual focus 7 Artisans 50mm ƒ0.95, a lump of glass that is wacky at best all the way to ƒ2 and then requires presence of mind until about ƒ8. All with a de-clicked aperture ring. Coincidentally, ‘wacky’ formed much of the look I was going for here and I decided to shoot entirely in jpeg only and with the Fuji Acros B&W recipe. All that really means is that when I got home, all I was doing was cropping and maybe fiddling with exposure here and there. Quite often Lightroom feels like the end of level boss that you need to beat in order to get any results out of the outing. Right now, I’d rather use a cheat code than have to deal with any of that nonsense.

The objective here is the same as it so often was when this blog was regularly updated (back before the death of blogging was announced). That being to take a few photos, write some nonsense tangentially related to the photos and click “Publish” so I could get that small release of endorphins, making me feel like I’d done something that day.

I’ve been threatening (myself, in my head) quite a lot lately that I’m going to go all out and get a proper wildlife lens and do some of that. Almost as if I’m just going to wander into the countryside on any random Saturday and the wildlife is going to come and meet me to have their photo taken. It’s surely that easy, no? As I still have my Canon 5D and a selection of EF lenses lurking somewhere in a box, I was also intending on getting that kit out and hoping I still had that Sigma 150 macro. Or maybe I sold it back in 2014? I really don’t know. As usual, my main issues are an abundance of equipment and a lack of motivation.

Finally, no the dog isn’t mine. He joined me briefly on the beach to have a stick thrown and be told he was a good boy.