A little while ago, I published my 500th blog post. I wasn’t aware of it at the time but have recently had occasion to reflect on my photography and blogging. The summer has been really busy with work and Omicron but fortunately has also been busy with some exciting photography work that I will be able to share in due course. Recent posts have been a bit gear related with starting to use the Nikon Z9 and Nikkor Z 100-400mm. These technical posts are among the most popular but are not my favourite to write so today I am going to step back to the beginning.

My journey in digital photography began in 2003 with with a Canon Powershot S45. Until then I had used Black & White film (Ilford HP5, FP4 or Kodak TriX or PanX) or colour slide (Kodak Ektachrome 100 or 200, Fuji Velvia 50) in Olympus OM2n, OM4 or Nikon F90 SLR cameras. An Olympus mju did excellent duty as a point and shoot with colour negative film (usually Kodak Gold).

My decision to delay my entry into the digital world had been partially that I was busy studying and knew that the digital darkroom was likely to be even more attractive that the wet darkroom had been. This was also behind my decision to purchase the Canon S45 as it was one of the few cameras at the time that saved RAW images. I purchased a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements while I still had access to a student discount and so began the learning curve, which accelerated once the Nikon D70 arrived and I could use my collection of Nikkor lenses. My Nikkor 80-200 f2.8D on the D70 gave field of view of a 300mm which was great to start exploring birds and wildlife.

WildLight Photography (www.wildlight.co.nz) was launched as a website in 2006 primarily to share pictures of the children’s football games with team mates and family. This was extremely basic and created with FrontPage and went through a couple of very labour intensive and inflexible iterations. The Word Press version launched on 14 September 2012 and came with a blog page. The second post celebrated Edin and I being finalists in a local photography competition in association with the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition.

Posts were intermittent and not something I focussed on much, resulting some big gaps between published posts. Prompted by Edin’s commitment to publish a weekly post when her site www.edinz.com launched I followed her lead and published a post as a routine on a Sunday. There are times that this has been hard and even seemed a chore, needing to store up and schedule a stock of posts before travel, but it is now a discipline I enjoy and look forward to. A decent coffee and an Ouma rusk ( it used to be 2 until I saw how calorie dense they are!) is the trigger to start my hour or so of image exploration and writing. A little ritualised space in the week.

I celebrated my 100th post with a piece on what photography means to me and reading through it I realise nothing has changed and if I wrote what I was drafting in my head I would simply be repeating myself. A common habit with age!

Another affliction of age of a resistance to change and I have been guilty of this on the computer front. I have really enjoyed my old 2010 27 inch iMac despite it’s age. A boost in RAM and some open heart surgery to install a SDD kept it going but now not able able to run the latest Mac OS and thus not the latest versions of Lightroom, Photoshop or my favoured Nik plugins meant I was looking at beachballs a lot of the time. The Nikon Z9 files were not supported and even my 2012 MacBook Pro could not render previews efficiently for me to do the work I needed to in the time available.

Desperation saw me searching the web in the early hours of the morning. Ordering from Apple would not have got me anything prior to my image delivery deadline but I found a single MacBook Pro 16 in stock with my favoured local supplier which was delivered 2 days later. This has been a revelation in speed and display. I had given up editing on my previous 15in MacBook Pro as I found I needed to re-edit when I got home and got the images on a bigger screen. The new M1 Pro MacBook Pro 16 is physically no bigger than the previous MacBook Pro 15 but has a larger screen due to the narrow bezels and is a delight to edit on. Attached to a Thunderbolt dock, Thunderbolt drives and 27in 4K display gives me access to my whole archive and space to work. The upgrades to Lightroom and Photoshop make for a much more efficient workflow that I am adapting to.

Part of the process has been having to import my archive of photographs back into Lightroom and this has exposed me to a multitude of memories, some happy, some sad, young faces grown to adult, young adults now older, some faces lost to us. Memories to savour and feel grateful for. A trip down memory lane showing from where we have come. We know where we have been but have no knowledge of what lies ahead. Savouring every possible moment of every day is crucial. Photography and blogging is part of that for me.