2018. You’re my kaleidoscope.

Every year for the past few years I’ve followed my annual wedding photography collection post with a post of photos from my personal life so I’m continuing that tradition right here, right now. 50ish photos of my family and a few landscapes from some of the amazing and less amazing places I’ve visited this year… Yosemite and Reno being the two ends of that scale… plus everything in between.

Capturing my own life is hard. I always mention it in these posts. Picking up a camera between weddings always feels difficult. Part of that was to do with the fact that I passionately hate carrying my ‘big cameras’ around with me when I’m out and about… because I hate looking like ‘that guy’. So I’ve always tried to find the perfect compact camera. And I’ve always failed. The closest I came was the Sony RX1R which I adored but was just infuriating to use at times. I’ve shot a multitude of film cameras that I’ve loved and then fallen out of love with. Last year I bought, fell in love with and grew to hate the Olympus OM-D E-M5ii. And not having a small camera which inspires me is the biggest reason of all why I don’t take more photos of my own life. I don’t like using a phone for photos.

That changed this year. In my wedding work I switched to the Sony A7iii. You can see my full YouTube review here. That camera is not only perfect for weddings but paired with the dinky Sony 35mm 2.8 lens (aka the minibeast) it’s ideal for my personal photography too. It’s small enough that it doesn’t make me look like ‘that guy’ and I know it inside out and trust it so much to make the kind of photos I want to make when I lift the camera to my eye. And I say that without any affiliation to Sony. Yet. It reinvigorated my creative spirit in so many ways and I now take it pretty much everywhere hanging off my belt… which sort of still does make me look like ‘that guy’ I guess but we’ll gloss over that.

Taking photos between weddings is my playground where my ‘work’ gets better and evolves. It’s where I try equipment and test techniques and play with photography so that I can bring new approaches and ideas into my wedding photography and editing style. As I did with my 2018 weddings post I’m going to start with a little video where I introduce you to two of my favourite people whose faces feature throughout the rest of this post…

Happy 2019!

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