That was a rather longer gap than expected.

One of the more curious things about having your own business is that it can become a bit of a world in itself, with all the dangers that come from living in a relatively socially enclosed space.

Work has been very slow too, from October and our disappointing holiday through to this month when things started up again, and that has caused a certain amount of introspection and thinking about the future. We had begun to ask if the business had a future and what the next steps needed to be. I was also not entirely keen to go back to doing some of the things I'd done: the pressures could become huge at times, and there had been points when it really had become too much. I don't seem to have the gene for continually working at maximum capacity 60+ hours per week with no end in sight other than a wooden box.

It's not all been idle though, and I'm wondering now about starting the photography side of things back up. Not to do weddings & portraits especially, but producing images for people to print & hang, or for web/magazine publication.

This was prompted, as much as anything, by someone here who also runs a business asking if he could have a couple of my pictures printed for his office: he'd 'take care of me for my time' plus the cost of the print. That's not exactly how things work in photography unless you're doing a wedding/commercial shoot, but it was really nice of him to ask. He picked out a couple of shots from the 50 or so I had that were suitable and chose the sizes. I arranged for them to be canvas-printed and the deal was done. They came back a week later and looked really nice, to the point where people then started suggesting I should get more printed to hang up around here as advertising.

Like I say, the 'proper' work side is picking up, but I now plan to create a proper web site for commercial sales. It's all taking time as I'm learning to get the best from the software tools I have for image processing, and because what I'm doing for some images is partly a creative process (rather than just the equivalent of D&P) then it takes even longer. Plus none of the computers I own or am likely to for a while are up to spec for this kind of work, and it all takes AGES while images import, export, render etc. Patience isn't just a virtue but a necessity.

Anyway, I've no plans to abandon the blog just yet!