In 2018, I marked 50 years of taking photos with an epic photo adventure on the other side of the world. It had started in 2017 on our return visit to Latvia to meet our newborn granddaughter. We were delighted and besotted, of course, and I took a lot of photos (I took the Nikon gear on this trip) even though she spent most of her time asleep.
We had spent Christmas in Latvia’s beach resort, Jurmala, and we greeted 2018 in an icy village square somewhere south of Riga. But since we were that far north in the thick of the northern winter, I wanted to go further into the Arctic and try to photograph the Aurora Borealis.
In mid-January, we flew to Finnish Lapland, well above the Arctic Circle. We had three nights at the Nellim Wilderness Resort at 68 degrees north. For context, if you were at 68 degrees south, you would be a few hundred kilometres south of Casey Station in Antarctica.
Clouds obscured the aurora for the first two nights. On the third, the sky cleared and I booked a snowshoe expedition away from the resort into the darkness beyond a frozen lake. The aurora put on a fine display and I was able to capture photos that will never be possible for me in Australia. Because I was taking long exposures, I had plenty of time to watch the mesmerising elegance of the slow, misty dance across the sky. The glow of that night stayed with me for a long time. I have seen plenty of better photos of the aurora but I am delighted to have my own.
However, for much of my life and for much of this blog, family matters most. Later in 2018, our lovely granddaughter and her parents visited Australia and I could further indulge my photo appetite. Instead of Latvia’s ice and snow, the background now was Middleton Beach in Albany.
My fiftieth year of taking photos was a wonderful year, with highlights far from home and highlights in my back yard. I wouldn’t state a preference for one over the other. American photographer Harold Feinstein said photography was his ‘way of bearing witness to the joy I find in seeing the extraordinary in ordinary life’. I agree. I feel delighted and privileged when I encounter extraordinary sights and have the opportunity to capture a great photo of something special. I am equally delighted to find and photograph the extraordinary in the ordinary, and there is no better example of that than the growth of a child.
That seems a fitting way to wind up my blogs over a year, reflecting on 50 years of taking photos. According to Henri Cartier-Bresson, your first 10,000 photographs are your worst. So, if you have followed this blog from the beginning, I guess you have now seen a selection of my worst photographs over five decades. From here on, hopefully, they will get better. I think they have improved over the years, although I was pleased that among the early years’ photos, I found quite a few that I rate reasonably well.
My final word on 50TTL is that taking a photograph, any photograph, is a quiet assertion of the idea that this moment now might just matter sometime in the future. It is an act of hope and a fundamental expression of optimism. It implicitly expects continuity of culture and engagement with meaning.
Thank you for reading.