Next month I will be celebrating my fortieth anniversary of working as a photographer. For almost every one of the thirty-nine Augusts that I have been in the business I have either been very quiet or have had to fill my time with photography work that doesn’t necessarily involve taking pictures. The bar chart above shows how much I have worked in the month over the years since I have been back in the world of freelancing. The table clearly shows a few anomalies and the main points of those are:

• 2012: Working on the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games as part of the photo management team
• 2014: The first year where I made some of my income working as a photo-editor on sports projects
• 2017: Laid up after some serious back surgery – so no work of any kind
• 2020: Despite the covid lockdowns I did do some editing and some consultancy
• 2021: The delayed Tokyo Paralympic Games
• 2022: Lambeth Conference
• 2024: Paris Paralympic Games

Some good years and plenty of flat and relatively uninteresting years have passed and August has become a month of trying not to worry about keeping busy whilst enjoying some time off – which is a lot easier when you live pretty near the beach. Of course it isn’t just August; the latter half of July and the first week in September are often much the same.

The thing about photography and taking time off is that you very quickly lose your ‘muscle memory’ and your instinctive movement between various buttons and controls become something you actually have to think about again until you have a couple of jobs under your belt. I have written about photography and muscle memory before so I won’t go into the kind of deep explanations that I have previously blogged about but I just wanted to mention what I am doing over the summer months to make sure that it doesn’t happen this year.

Luckily I have picked up a few commissions which have helped with keeping my hand in but to maintain the critical sharpness and make sure that I can concentrate on the creative stuff I have been out with cameras for a walk here and there and shot some frames just for the sake of it. The family albums tend to be filled up a bit and I even have a few ideas whilst taking pictures that nobody is paying me for. Personal projects are a great idea in the quiet times because they really help you to think about photography. You can stick marketing yourself, archiving and doing tax returns to one side and just let yourself go.

This year I have been playing with shooting using the LCD screen on the backs of my cameras a lot more (still not a fan but I am getting way better at it) and conversely sorting through and reviewing images using the viewfinder (definitely a fan and will be using this more and more). I have also been playing about with using a digital camera to digitise some transparencies with the amazing Valoi Easy 35 and Easy 360 set ups and using my Canon RF 85mm f2 Macro lens with a couple of third party extension tubes instead of my old Tamron 90mm f2.8 Macro lens. Finally, I have been getting my pre-1994 archive ready so that if I decide to remove it from Alamy I can upload it to my own library sales system.

There’s plenty to do if you look for it.

I’ll close this high summer blog post with a photograph that I took yesterday evening when out for a walk with my wife. Who can resist a sunset when you live in such an interesting part of the world? I like to have people in pictures no matter what I’m shooting so I’ll wish everyone a busy August and what, I hope for me is a busier September.