A short video giving a snapshot of Lynn’s travels in 2022

With the end of another year staring us in the face, and the recognition that it is two years since I posted a blog, I thought this would be a good time to share a short piece entitled ‘Time’ that I submitted to The Photowalk podcast last year.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas … two days late!

This is a story of two parts that come together for the final act. Bear with me…

In August 2017, I travelled to the United States for the first time for a trip to the Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, which was timed to coincide with a total solar eclipse. I left you last time having arrived in West Yellowstone.

In August 2017, I travelled to the United States for the first time for a trip to the Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, which was timed to coincide with a total solar eclipse. The point of entry was Salt Lake City from where we would connect to Jackson Hole. It has to be said that my arrival was the most ignominious I have made anywhere!

Many years ago, I went to Kenya and had always had a wish to go back to Africa. In October 2018, I finally returned to the continent, with Zimbabwe as my destination; a beautiful but troubled country.

What do you think of when you hear the word ‘Transylvania’? Dracula, the Rocky Horror Show? What about ‘Romania’? Ceaușescu? Who can forget the awful images of the Romanian orphanages that emerged in 1989? Brutal Communist architecture? That’s pretty much what I had in my head when I booked a photo trip to Transylvania. To be honest, I didn’t even know exactly where it was in Romania!

Way back in March, when I was talking about the Royal Photographic Society Exhibition in which I have an image, I mentioned that I was working towards obtaining the RPS Licentiate Distinction (LRPS) and then said no more. So to redress that…

‘Spain sounds a bit tame’ was the general response I got to my proposed trip to Albarracín back in June. Ok, it’s not Mongolia or China but, apart from a trip to Majorca as a teenager, I’d not been to Spain and I find any new destination exciting; it’s the discovery of the unknown that is the draw. And part of that draw was the fact that Albarracín is a medieval town that hasn’t changed much over the centuries.

I have recently spent a couple of days in a local hide photographing a pine marten and red squirrels. Living where I do and getting the odd glimpse of both species, I forget that most people don’t have that privilege and, dare I say it, don’t even know of their existence.

I shot film, in the good old days of my Kodak Instamatic and Olympus point and shoot, and remember all too well waiting for the prints to come back, anticipation rising often to be reduced to disappointment at the results. What I never did though was develop anything in the darkroom.

Photography is all about being in the right place at the right time to get the light, and you’ll often hear photographers talk about ‘chasing the light’. But sometimes the weather just doesn’t play ball; you can be handed a grey, flat day when the sun stays firmly hidden. On days like that, it is all too tempting to burrow back down under the duvet, think ’stuff it’ and not go out.

Who remembers the 1980s marketing slogan “Glasgow’s Miles Better” to encourage tourists to visit and industry to locate there? I used to visit Glasgow fairly frequently in the late 1980s/early 1990s, but hardly since.

I’m often asked what I do with all the images I take. The truth is not much.

One of the best things that has come out of the trips I do is the friendships I have made. And even better when those friendships continue and flourish beyond the trips we sign up to.

My journeys with a camera started with a photo trip to St Kilda, a group of islands off the west coast of Scotland that feel as if they are on the edge of the earth.