The last couple of months have flown by, I’ve moved house, turned 32, took some time off work to visit East Sussex, and have been thoroughly enjoying the shift into spring.

London has a particular feeling this time of year, crisp cool mornings with golden sun. People seem more lively as everyone comes out of winter hibernation and there is energy in the air. I do miss the usual April rain which has been noticeably absent so far this year. There is something special about erratic warm showers with heavy droplets that are gone almost as soon as they arrive that adds to that energy, and it’s a large part of what makes spring my favorite season of the year.

Work has been a little hectic recently, but in a good way. We’ve been working with some exciting partners to develop a concept for a new application for one of our products. As part of this I was given some freedom to create a range of high level architectural approaches, which we then narrowed down in feedback sessions. So far we’ve had a very positive response and as we approach delivery of a prototype demonstrator, we should know soon if we’re going to be given the resources to build the full production-ready version.

For my birthday my partner gifted me a Chinon Dart Super super-8 camera (which is definitely up there as one of the coolest gifts I’ve ever received), and I’ve been really enjoying digging in to the details of how to get it working and how to use it. There is surprisingly little information online for this specific model. I also recently shot something other than Porta 400 or Fuji Industrial 400, 2 rolls of Kodak UltraMax 400, while the saturation gives a wonderful depth to the colour in certain light conditions, the UltraMax feels cheaper (probably because it is) in comparison to the aforementioned. Although, there is a good chance it could just as well be my own skills are lacking. Maybe the Ultramax is in-fact more forgiving and I’ve actually been losing the rich colours in my Portra shots? Either way the push to learn more about analogue photography, and now video, has motivated me to hone my skills a little further. It’s definitely inspired me to be a bit more experimental with my film selection in future too.

Goal setting in spring! I want to quit nicotine entirely, giving up smoking is good but it’s been replaced by vaping and It’s an ugly habit. I’ve started running again, so more of that too, and I think getting another year older and firmly into the realm of ‘not in my 20s anymore’ has lit a bit of a fire to set some good health habits in stone. I want to continue developing this site, once I got it up and running I felt like I had ‘finished’ the project. ‘Get something online’, but it’s public now and I want to nurture it further. I think this is what this update is the beginning of, I have some backlog items to upload like a visit to an interesting plant shop, and the shots from my holiday, but what I really need to do is write my first article, so let’s look out for that.