The End of 2025
Happy New Year to you all!
It’s been a pretty solid year really, even with the housing market - which is my main source of income - having a wobble for the second half of the year. The momentum built through the last 12 months should, hopefully, feed forward into the New Year which, by all predictions, looks promising. The biggest achievement of the year was getting my LBipp on first submission, it wasn’t as good as a result as I had been dreaming of, but having never put my work forward like that I really had no idea what I was doing! I went for a bit of a shotgun approach with a bit of everything rather than sticking to my core “art” photography as I wanted to include commercial and more “picture postcard” type images - essentially throwing a load of things at the wall and seeing what stuck. As it transpired my “art” approach was hugely well recieved which has now informed my next panel which will be entirely fine-art… I am also planning on it being analogue at the moment, although that may change!
Commercially it was a reasonable year in terms of sales, the first half was strong before the market got the fear of the budget, but with that now out the way and generally uneventful, things will hopefully get back to rights early in 2026. The predictions from all the large agencies seem to be suggesting this to be the case, with prices increasing steadily in Scotland and interest rates coming down along with a little wage inflation, it’s looking good. Infact, the suggestion is, the next 5 years are looking to build on each other nicely, so we should be seing a steady uptick year on year from my perspective too.
I am going to be putting more time and effort into building the fine art side, certainly over the next 12 months, as I have been meaning to get that up and running properly for years. This is where the ambition lies for the moment, it’s a real passion project to see my work hanging in some galleries! Whether I get there this year is another matter, it took a while to build the commercial business so I really should be realistic and see this as a multi-year project! Just now I am working on refining my analogue techniques, the actual taking of photographs is fine, and the film processing it pretty reliable now (I did mess up 2 films recently which has brought me back down to Earth a touch, but I think I know why that happened so can mitigate it in future). Printing is improving, but still not where I want it to be before I start experimenting with different papers and chemistry… I have a master class booked in for the 8th though which will hopefully give me a bit of a leg up.
Looking more generally at the last 12 months - the family are all doing well, my health is actually improving - with the post car-crash weight gain finally reversed! I am not where I want to be yet, but I am well on the way! Many years ago I got fit and my weight then was about 7kg lower than it is right now, given I have probably lost a wee bit of muscle mass I want to be looking at about another 10kg down I think, I had hoped to be there for the end of the year, but half way is better than nothing, so work to do over the next few months! I am really focussing on back health along with this, and strengthening the support structures to mitigate the crash damage to my lower spine so far as possible - as getting this sorted out will make it much easier to explore some of the landscapes I want to shoot!
We have some adventures starting to firm up too, which are looking really exciting! I haven’t spent much time with one of my very closest and my oldest friend in ages, so we are looking at fixing that with a week somewhere a little off the beaten track this summer! It’s going to be a case of travelling light I think so I may be looking at some new camera gear to take with me on that adventure - and I am strongly looking at Fujifilm for that. Realistically it will probably be an X100 VI, but deep down… and if I can get a strong start to the year… I may look at the GFX100 RF instead. I have ambitions to replace my landscape digital camera with the Fujifilm GFX system over the next year or two anyway as I am attracted to both the medium format sensor size and it’s inbuilt XPan mode which would be great for my panoramic work. It’s early days on that though as first off is getting myself on more stable financial ground, probably going VAT registered in April and almost certainly changing the car for something with a bit more range too.
So this year has many plans forming already, I am looking ahead with positivity and some degree of excitement to see how it all pans out!
With that said, all that remains is to say Happy New Year once more, and see you in 2026!
