While things wound down for Christmas, whatever wave of luck I was riding following graduation seemed to immediately disappear as my Macbook’s Hard drive suddenly died. Only weeks before I had begun looking back at what I had taken over the past six years, figuring out what my next steps would be for myself as a photographer. A moment later it was if I had tripped on a digital shoe lace, causing me to stubble and fall; what was contained on that Macbook hard drive was essentially my life. For the next few days I attempted various states of rescue yet all of these failed. I lost everything. At least everything edited. Thankfully I had all my original RAW files backed up on an external hard drive, along with all my uni work. On the face of it, while it could have been a whole lot worse, it still meant that the first few months of 2015 was going to be spent more so editing than anything else. Apple were great by the way, applying a fix within a matter of days with a new hard drive completely for free.
Yet here was the silver lining. Whatever caused this to happen, whatever forces of nature were at play, out bore not only a project but a whole other way of producing work. Perhaps that little dark period of losing so much, or as I preferred to call it, the week of hell caused a weird injection of black (and white) into my life. During the latter months of 2012 I was fortunate to visit Kenya as part of a four day safari across East Tsavo and West Tsavo. To say this was life changing was an understatement. The scenes that I was presented with over those four days were like nothing I had ever seen or even imagined. While I did edit a good half a dozen photos after returning home to England, I still had hundreds of images left gathering digital cobwebs; with my third year of four already underway and a week into the new term, the majority of these photos were put aside for a later date. With further university projects and deadlines seemingly continuous, the idea of a later date seems more likely to be somewhere towards the end of time.
I have always wondered if things happen for a reason, whether good or bad. Ultimately I find despite some shocking lows, those highs do appear eventually. Losing all my work quickly gave me a reason to begin again. I suppose finishing university was a little like passing a driving test; only then when the instructor has left and the car is finally yours and yours alone do you start to truly learn.
Tsavo was born from that initial-dire wiped affair. A fifty one image series showcasing a four day journey across two of the largest and oldest National Parks in Kenya, Tsavo East and Tsavo West. The whole series took around six to eight weeks of editing, the longest period I had ever devoted to a selection of images in Lightroom in my life. I was meticulous. Granted I was also busy with a few other things during this time, a self-employment course being another major time sink, yet during this time I began to live and breathe Tsavo; my first truly serious project since my degree had finished.
I felt very proud of what I had in front of me. As the series was developing, I received confirmation to be part of ETALAGE III in Manchester in May, which as I write this is less than two weeks away. Plus during the start of April, I was also offered Devonport Guildhall in Plymouth to exhibit the same series throughout June. In my opinion, Tsavo deserves a good long run and hopefully I will get a few more exhibitions out of this series while I begin work on my next project, though more on that in a future blog post.
So there we have it. In the coming weeks and months I will begin to add and unravel a little more information about myself and how I got into photography, my projects and the many images produced during my university years, where I am now, who I am, and hopefully, where I am heading.
