Sporadicity
My photography of late has really been hit and miss. The weather in latter half of the year has been abysmal and my broken 24-120mm walkabout lens really has impacted my output to a devastating extent. 
The flexibility that this range affords is critical to my general photography and without it, it seems that I default to wildlife photography exclusively.
Oddly I’ve also not shot any macro to speak of this year at all, and somehow I completely missed autumn. Even when the weather did provide some sunlight to ignite the Fall colours, I tended to stay indoors and watch photography-related videos rather than go and take photographs myself. It appears that I’ve lapsed into a state of enthusiastic photographic procrastination – a condition I’ve fought for many years to avoid. Disappointing, to say the least!
I think most amateur photographers pass through phases of inactivity, as the real world around them shifts and re-orients. To some extent this has happened to me over the last few months. Looking through my blog history, I see a litany of posts about quiet times, scattered amid posts about my photographic hits and successes. It does seem that it’s a feature rather than a bug, when I look objectively at how my endeavour ebbs and flows.
Looking back at my last blog entry, I see that I’d passed through a period of under-activity but it seems that I was at the time in some kind of denial about the direness of it all! 😀 I had great plans which, I now recognise, ultimately fell by the wayside.
I’d planned an infrared project which failed epically, and even felt compelled to erase all mention of it in my earlier blog. Perhaps I’ll launch that at the beginning of the new year, but don’t hold your breath or hold me to it right now. I’d also decided to fire up a new black and white film simulation (BW36#2), but the parameters for that were somewhat shonky and loose, to the extent that it fully fell in on itself. I can’t say what I’ll be doing over the next few months because things for me at the moment appear very unsure. I don’t feel like I should be making promises I can’t keep. In the words of Wade Wilson – AKA Deadpool – “Rock, meet Bottom”.
Downgrading Upgrades
I mentioned in my August post that I’d bought a Nikon D7200 for wildlife photography. Well, that didn’t work out. I actually found that I prefer the images from my D5300! Although the D7200 has two card slots, a bigger buffer and faster framerate, ultimately the images from that camera were not as pleasing or as easy to work with as the older and more consumer grade D5300. I think the focusing system in the D7200 may have been backfocusing slightly as well, though I wasn’t able to fine-tune the problem out, and the sensor certainly seemed to be a downgrade on some levels too. It’s something that I can’t explain, but it is what it is and the D5300 is the one I prefer, by quite a margin.
So, you might ask, what HAVE I been doing over the last quarter (and a bit)? Well, not much. A lot of watching Youtube, job hunting, watching TV and generally being unproductive. It’s not to say that I haven’t taken photos at all in this period, but the volume of output has certainly been low. Expand the link below to view my gallery of images from this period. There are some fairly strong images as well as some not quite so strong. This is my journal and I long ago committed to sharing the good and the bad. They are what they are. 🙂
