Where are we going?

Full of Frets

May 12

I thought I would take a little time to just document some thoughts on where I feel I am with my photography and a few other things.

I have now completed my Foundation Degree in Arts (FdA) as it's a two-year programme. I will get my results in a few weeks' time. A foundation degree is similar to the older Higher National Diploma (HND). In September I will start on my 'BA top-up' year, which will get me a Bachelor of Arts with Honours, hopefully…

My tutors have already been talking to me about then going on to doing a Master's Degree. The recommended route being to do it part-time over two years. I will need to start investigating that soon.

I will be honest that I did not anticipate spending so much of my time in the world of analogue photography. I had realised that 35mm film would feature, but I never envisaged working with medium format, let alone large format, film cameras. I definitely did not expect to be buying medium and large format camera equipment…

For my third year project work, I suspect I will be looking at more analogue work and alternative photographic processes. I would like to do some landscape photography with the 5x4 camera, but that is quite a challenge.

I have bought some darkroom equipment and chemistry for both standard development and some alternative processes such as cyanotype. If I have the time, I will experiment with this a bit over the summer.

I'm a bit unsure about my precise plans for the summer. Part of me wants to go away on a summer holiday somewhere, but I do feel that Covid is still an issue, and it deters me from jumping too soon. I said right at the outset of all of this that I thought it would be 2023 before we 'get back to normal'. I based that assessment on what happened a century ago with "Spanish 'flu" and other historic incidents.

I have booked myself onto a bookbinding course, so there is that to look forward to. I am thinking about booking a music course. The one I was going to book I've not been able to accommodation for. I could get accommodation if I were to drive six or seven miles in each day, but that removes part of the experience.

There is another one I am thinking about in Oxford.

Astronomy has suffered through a mix of poor weather and a lack of enthusiasm, in part caused by the weather… I am slowly acquiring the kit to make life more automated, which will make it easier. A major impediment is the set-up time for start taking images. The fully manual process is around an hour, in which time it can cloud over, which has happened to me.

There's not much that can be done known until August as it is now not dark enough. I am booked for a week away in a dark sky location in the autumn, so we will see where that leads.

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