sgwarnog's latest photos

Welcome to my Blipfoto patch. I've been posting here since December 2010.

I post combinations of text and image that capture something about my life, the places I inhabit and visit, and the things that I see. This reflects an interest in natural history and culture and fragments of urban and rural landscapes. This is also where I record some of my interests, so within the overall journal there is a butterfly journal, recording what and where I've seen things, and a football journal, recording matches I've been to and new grounds visited.

I'm Welsh, but have spent all of my adult life in Northern England, first the north-west (Lancaster) , then the NE (Sunderland, Newcastle upon Tyne, Gateshead) and since 2005 in Yorkshire (Bradford). The majority of my blips are taken within Bradford District, but my travels take me further afield at times. As of 2019 I started working n Leeds rather than Bradford, so that will have quite an impact on my work day blips.

If Sgwarnog proves too much of a mouthful, feel free to call me Peter.

Blipping has taken me into some interesting directions, and unexpectedly led to gallery exhibition of blips in January and February 2012. There are some images from the exhibtion in my Blipfolio. I started out devoting a lot of time and energy to my blips, and to contributing to the community but I haven't been able to sustain that. My entries are now a lot briefer than they used to be, the photos more low key and I'm afraid I'm no longer a prolific commenter.

I've been taking photographs since I was about 17. I used a hand-me-down 110 format Kodak pocket instamatic for a few months before receiving an Olympus XA-2 for my 18th birthday and it was this which I took away to university a couple of weeks later - this was to remain my main camera until it was burgled eight years later. I started practicing with an SLR in the early 90s, before picking up a second hand Pentax. This became my main camera for a couple of years before becoming a victim of misadventure. For the next ten years I used a variety of 35mm compacts, supplemented by the bequest of my Dad's Canon SLR. I was finally prompted into the digital world in 2004, but have never got beyond compacts, which I finds suits the Blipfoto philosophy of always having a camera at hand.

I write more than I photograph, so the accompanying text is important to me, although the average time that I give to journal entries has declined significantly over the past couple of years. I'm a micro-poetry enthusiast, so I sometimes use that form to complement the image, either a haiku, gogyohka or tanka or something similar, but again, not as much as I used to.

As a geographer, I see blipping as a way of exploring and representing place. Before Blipfoto kindly added a geotagging tool, I made a Google Map of my blips, but I haven't added anything to that for quite a while now..

Email: sgwarnog@yahoo.com