Please excuse my recent lack of blogging – I’ve been very busy personally and with my commercial photography.
Working as a fulltime and freelance photographer is a lot of fun, but it’s also time consuming.

I’m currently taking on a lot of summer shoots (family, weddings, babies and children, engagement etc), so blogging and art photography have hit the back burner. However, I did get out to shoot some landscapes around Northern Ireland this past week for a future book that will be available in Northern Ireland and hopefully online too. The first batch of photos (seven) are currently available on my flickr, so go look!

Keep checking back, I’ve lots of new photos that I’ll be blogging in the coming days and weeks. This is set to be a very photographed summer on my end.

Houston, New Braunfels & Humble, Texas. From my trip to the grandest state of all, last summer. I am still trawling through the images from last year and no doubt will continue to do so. Admittedly I wasted the trip photographically because it’s truely one of the most photogenic places I’ve ever been to and I returned with hardly a single photograph I could say I loved. All the more of an excuse to return?

An update on my little kitty, Moses. He’s now six months old, getting big and full of personality.

I’m sorry that everyone has already been subjected to listening about this escapade and seeing this photo multiple times over the internet, but…..

On Monday, I (along with my friend Claire) met Tori Amos. My favourite musician of eleven years (Tori fans are dedicated and that’s an understatement). I then had the pleasure of seeing her live in the Savoy Theatre, London, where she belted out a great mix of old and new songs.
The setlist was as follows:

Famous Blue Raincoat
Lady in Blue
Curtain Call
Crucify
Chat/Smooth Operator Improv
Leather
Maybe California
Mary Jane
Taxi Ride
Jackie’s Strength
Wednesday
Welcome To England
Cool On Your Island
Silent All These Years
Barons of Suburbia

Encore:
Somewhere Over the Rainbow
Putting the Damage On

Sailing away from North Wales on a boat, sometime in the middle of winter 2005/2006.

So I’ve got thousands of photographs from the past five+ years to sort through and get in order and I’m finally doing it. They come in the form of negatives, scans, undeveloped films, digital files, discs, hard drives and prints. Some are snapshots, some are for University projects, some are for exhibition and the majority are of my main practice – photojournalism and documentary photography, documenting my life over the past almost-decade.

One of the things I am really unsure of about my work has always been how chopping I am with my style. I say it’s experimental but I know it’s actually a huge turn off to have no fluidity to your work. It’s something I recognized in my work and how I work. I’ve dabbled in most or all aspects of photography: fashion, fine art, band/music, commercial, overly-photoshopped, minimal, abstract, grainy, clear, well-lit, badly-lit. You name it, I’ve tried it.
So on review of these photographs, all three trillion of them (well, that’s how it feels), I’m getting a bit more comfortable with my development.

I started off as primarily a landscape photographer. I grew up in one with most scenicly beautiful landscapes on my doorstep and taking day trips throughout Northern Ireland I picked up on how to work a camera. The first photographer to ever inspire me was Annie Liebovitz (cliché, but to this day she’s still one of – if not my biggest influence). It wasn’t her portraits that initially drew me in, it was her landscape work. With her leading the way, I began to dabble in portraiture and so and so forth. When I went to the University of the Arts to study photography, a part of me abandoned my roots in photojournalism, basic portraiture and landscape to take up ‘conceptual photography’. I think that threw me off and over the past few years my work has, for me personally, frustrated me and made me feel like I’d lost my edge.

So, as I’m sure it’s obvious where I’m going with this, the bottom line is – I need to get back to my roots. I’m a photojournalist. Sure, I can dabble in fashion and work some decent portraiture for editorials. There’s still no harm in being a fine art and conceptual photographer too, but I need to keep working on what feels more natural. I can appreciate conceptual photography and I will continue to use staging and layered meanings in my work, but it all started out focused on the visuals and that’s what I need to re-kindle.

So bare with me, there might be a lot of oldies, but what better way is there to return to your roots other than going through the roots themselves.