Normally I feel that January is mostly a transition between Christmas and spring. This year was no exception, especially with the cold snaps and storms, but other than that, January has actually been a good month. It’s been all about decluttering life, recovering from stress, making good decisions, coming back to activities, and getting things done.
- Instead of building a photography website, I went ahead with my idea/plan to merge everything into one blog, here on my personal domain
- I finally decided to quit Instagram and feel great about it. If you want to follow me on social-ish media, I’m on Bluesky, Substack and Facebook, but the majority of what I post will be here on the blog.
- We moved our business e-mail and more over to Proton
- Fitness improvements
- And other good things!
Getting back to photography
If you know me, you also know that winter is always my lowest season with the camera. Most of my photography happens outdoors. I take photos of insects, flowers, forest paths, rocks, waves, anything I find interesting during my walks and more.
But since the autumn of 2024 kept me at home a lot because of my foot injury, I didn’t get much photography done at all and I’ve been missing it so much. I wanted to start an indoor photography project but how do you do that when your house is a cluttered mess? After we emptied the old office, my husband was sick and then the weather has been too bad to get things to the recycling centre or charity shops, so we still have boxes of stuff to go through.
Despite all this, I’m slowly getting back in action with the camera.
On one of the good days in mid-January, I went with my photographer friend to a nearby beach. It was cloudy but mild and very pleasant. And there were lovely waves.
I always feel very lost when I get to a beach with the camera. I was really pleased with the first image above, but I’m not the typical landscape photographer. Perhaps the next time I’ll focus on closeups of mussels instead, and bring the other camera with the macro lens.
A camera outing this week led us to the old abbey in a nearby village. It’s always an interesting place to visit – moody, kind of eerie.. it has the potential for good photos, but I rarely manage to capture anything interesting. Some of them were ok-ish, and I had a good time.
Despite the clutter at home, I managed to start some indoor projects. A food photography competition in my camera club got me started with some food photography, and I’ve been enjoying that a lot. I’d prefer natural light for food photography, but this is northern Europe and it’s January!
Instead I started DIY-ing with the lights I have, and created “softboxes” using the lid of an IKEA box, cut a square and covered it with tracing paper, and on the other side I used a piece of mounting board, covering the aperture with another sheet of tracing paper. The black background is my husband’s t-shirt over a chopping board!
But I don’t do food photography like most people. I bought these little climbers on Etsy a while back, and have enjoyed playing around with them. I don’t expect to get any high scores at the competition, so I’m focusing on getting creative and having fun with it.
I’ll get back to this type of photography… and I have more figurines on the way!
Fitness, and getting back to walking… or?
After my foot injury I haven’t really come back to my former glory with squats. Yes, I managed to do 60 kg squats during my heavy program in December, but I didn’t feel confident with them. Last July I felt invincible after lifting that weight, but now I was more like meh.
Perhaps it doesn’t even have to do with anything related to my foot, because from November, the injury didn’t really affect my training. Perhaps I was just generally stressed during the autumn and it affected my performance? During January it’s like I’ve come back to feeling more confident in the gym. There are always things to work on – form, range of motion and similar, but compared to some month ago, now everything just works. I seem to have better focus too.
Getting back to walking isn’t as straightforward. We’ve had a cold snap with ice and frost, then sideways rain, then a powerful storm, then more sideways rain. But I’ve taken advantage of the few good days.
We need to talk about music, or the lack thereof
Talking about meh… that totally describes my music skills right now. Oh, how much I want to come back to my golden days of playing the guitar. Our Saturday night gig is paused at the moment, and not having the regular gig has affected my playing skills a lot more than I thought.
I fell out of my good practice habits a long time ago, and now I desperately need to create a practice routine that works. I’m behind with everything! I stumble my way around the strings, or at least that’s what it feels like. Playing the concertina is actually working quite well, but the guitar… just no. Singing? It’s my strongest area in music, but I’m not sure where I am with it right now.
This weekend there’s a trad music festival going on in our town. We’re going to stroll between the different pubs to enjoy some good music on Saturday and Sunday, and we’re also joining some people we know for a session. That hopefully will give a good musical energy boost!
Plans for February
For February I’ll keep going with indoor photography projects, get back on the bike, keep up the good work in the gym, and I hope for better walking weather.
I’m thinking of committing to a strict music plan – picking 1-2 songs and a fiddle tune, and dedicate a specific timeframe every day to practice.
I’ve re-subscribed to the bluegrass singing class at Artistworks, so I’ll go through all the technique and theory lessons again… then pick up where I left off, and get back on track.
Other than that we may have travel plans! We need to travel more, and we specifically should travel more within Ireland. I’m looking forward to that.
I’m sharing this in the WBOYC (What’s been on your calendar?) link-up, hosted by these lovely ladies:
Sue from Women living well after 50
Jo from Story crumbs
Donna from Retirement reflections
Deb from Deb’s world
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