In January, I flew to Hong Kong for a couple of weeks to attend and document a very significant family event which I’ll tell you more about in a future post.

What I’d like to do in this post is to write about where I’ve been for the past few months or more precisely where my photographic mind has been.  Regular visitors here will know I’ve not posted for some time now; not here and not to Flickr either.

According to my Flickr stream, the last ‘thing’ I photographed and published online was Halloween celebrations in Sefton park at the end of October.  Come November, work started ramping up and I also fell ill for most of the rest of the year up until Christmas.  Whilst I continued to photograph over the festive period, it was all personal stuff involving family and friends.  So, none of it went into the public domain.

Then came January and I headed off to Hong Kong.  With months of planning behind me, I spent all of my waking hours taking photographs of things I’d seen before as well as exploring new territory.  Let’s not forget the ‘big thing’ I’d primarily gone over for.  All in all, it was a very memorable trip and I came back with thousands of images.  Processing them has taken some time to say the least.  I’ve a lot of family in Hong Kong so it was a great opportunity to catch up with people I hadn’t seen for years.  I even got to meet some for the fist time.

Soon after I’d returned to the UK, I felt a slight panic that I’d not posted any photos online for a while, but since I hadn’t completed processing my Hong Kong photos I didn’t want to upload anything ‘just yet’.  It’s now the end of March and that panic has since subsided.  Not only that, but it been replaced with questions about why I felt the need to share my photographs at all (in public at least).

The whole point of going to Hong Kong was to document a very important and personal event in order to have something to share with my family; current and future generations.  My desire to do this was very powerful indeed.  Now, after the event, it feels like it’s left a rather large hole which can’t be filled with the type of photographs that satisfied me before – a lot of which now seems rather shallow and superficial after photographing such a personal event which will have a lasting impact on my life.

I almost feel as though I’ve been put back on track; as if my photography was heading in a direction which wasn’t right for me.  It wasn’t me.  Perhaps, previously, I’d been too concerned with competing against other photographers to get the ‘best’ shot, to get the photographs which nobody else had, to get more comments on my photographs, to get higher in Explore, and competing with myself to be a better photographer.

Why?  I don’t know.  For the challenge and the recognition, I guess.  It’s not what I set out to do when I started in photography and I don’t think it’s where I should be headed.  I do want to continue to share because I think there are things in life worth sharing.  There are just some unanswered questions floating around in my head about what I photograph and why.

That said, I want to share my experience of Hong Kong with you.  So, you can expect lots of photos coming up!