Back to Bourtie

You may have noticed my absence from these pages for most of the month of January. There are several reasons for this.

Firstly, I've simply been so busy at work that there hasn't always been time to get out and take the kind of photographs I love during the brief daylight hours - so I've ended up 'breaking the chain' of taking at least one photograph every day that I'd maintained since I originally joined Blipfoto back in August 2010.

Then there's the 'Polaroid' branding to reckon with. All the blurb about this suggested it was marking out Blipfoto as essentially a kind of social networking site, as opposed to a place to post photographs based on their claim to any kind of expressive or artistic merit.

Besides that, it simply doesn't feel the same kind of place any more: before, it felt to me like I owed my fellow members and participants a kind of obligation to contribute something every day to 'keep up the community spirit' of the site and to 'keep things going'. With the corporate branding in place, it now feels to me like just another commercially-sponsored service that I will 'use' as and when it suits. Oh yes, and 'Membership': in most of the organisations I support through my work and those I personally am part of, that word implies some kind of ultimate say over the organisation's goals, and the strategic decisions it takes along the way. It seems my being a 'Member' of Blipfoto gave me no say over the 'Polaroid' branding issue: that, it seems, was just something that Joe, as the creator (and thus the 'owner') of the site went and fixed up with (quite evidently) no obligation to even consult with the so-called 'Members' of Blipfoto before the deal was concluded.

Anyhow, I got an email yesterday from one of my Blip followers saying how much they missed my landscapes here. So I decided to return.

Here then is the view yesterday morning (Thursday 29th January) up in the Parish of Bourtie, a few miles outside the town of Inverurie where I have my office...

It's now my intention to fill in some of the gaps for January 2015 by posting photographs for those dates over the past month when I have been able to get 'out and about' with a camera and had good enough results to put on show here.