F**k It

I said a little while ago I was working on putting motivational techniques into place and playing guinea pig to them to see if/which have any positive effects towards productivity. I had even written up the framework of the post that I would eventually share after a fair amount of time to give the techniques a chance to sink in.

There is one fundamentally huge obstacle in the way though. You need to be motivated to make motivational changes. They didn't think that one through properly eh? It's true that to make a change you have to really want to do it like with all the classics such as getting fit or giving up smoking. It is easy if you have the will power and enough Winston Churchill determination bubbling inside of yourself. However, as much as I want and need to make these fairly small alterations in life my enthusiasm peaked within a few hours of thinking the idea and it's slipped ever since.

So how do you motivate yourself to be motivated? Or encourage yourself to do something despite the anxiety, depression, fear, whatever it is that's mentally standing in your way?
One book that I read about a year ago by John C Parkin is  "Fuck It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way" Now don't be thrown off by the word spiritual if like me you don't have religious or spiritual beliefs because the book is actually pretty logical the whole way through. It's more life coaching than enlightenment. The underlying message is incredibly simple, just say fuck it.

2012 in summary

I said some time ago that I would write a post on depression and I have drafted one but I think it's easier to write about in context of the entire year. So I thought i'd do something cliche and take a look back at the past 12 months, which with new year coming up i'm sure a lot of people have started doing.

2012 was a slow start and that's because for the last six to nine months I had unknowingly been suffering with depression and it was a gradual decline downwards each month. I didn't have the motivation to do anything, no inspiration or desire to photograph and for the most part I didn't want to exist at all. Not die, I wasn't suicidal, I just didn't want to exist, perhaps a little hard to differentiate but ultimately two very different things. For two months I just read books. All the time. As soon as I woke up I would start reading and pretty much until I went to sleep, i'd just want to stay in that fantasy world because ultimately it was a lot more tolerable than reality. It got even worse when my guinea pig passed away. Now I know that they're just small fluffy rodents but she was MY small fluffy rodent and the last of four that i'd had over the past ten years so I felt extremely lost when she died and that pointless feeling to life just got worse and I no longer cared about anything.

That's a very short summed up paragraph of what is realistically very complicated. I've made it brief, skipping out most of the details of what actually happened but for the sake of an overview, you get the point. In terms of my career, i'd been promising to do shoots left right and center and just never managed to uphold to them due to the previously mentioned mental illness, but in March things finally came together for a shoot in Brighton and it helped re-inspire me. I always forget how much passion I have for photography when I haven't done it for a long time and then everything clicks back into place in my mind when I get behind the camera again.

All legs and personality.

This summer I returned to Stud UK Euro, they breed competition horses and I visited last year to get some shots for them and blogged a series of photos of their rising 2 and 3 year olds as well as the new foals.

I had seen them tweeting throughout spring this years new arrivals and was itching to go and play with some foals so asked if it would be ok to come and take some more photos, to which it was happily agreed that it was fine for me to come up any time.

He stalked me all around the field.
We became very good friends!

When I got to the offices to let them know I was there no one seemed to be expecting me so I mentioned that i'd arranged it with a lady over twitter that I was coming over to take some photos of the foals. Little did I know, twitter duties had been handed over from Katie, whom I had arranged things with the previous year, to Rupert (Husband & Business partner of the company). They called across to him to confirm that I was supposed to be there and directed me over to his office where upon arrival he introduced himself with "Hi, i'm the twitter lady." Bit humiliating!

Anyway, onto the foals! They're brilliant. In short, hilarious, sweet and cheeky. I had one little chap follow me around for a long time and kept getting in the way of my shots because he wanted ALL of my attention, I found myself sneaking round the field trying to outsmart him so that he would leave me in peace to work. For the most part they are all very inquisitive and as soon as I stepped through the gate I was full on ambushed by the lot of them, all curious to see who I was, what I was doing and what was in my hands. As well as the foals there is also the mares to contend with, those which are very sweet and enjoyed a scratch whilst others, understandably, were keeping an eye on the "kids." One in particular was happy to mind her own business and stay out the way but she had a particularly friendly foal who walked over to me a lot so she stood a little distance away but never took her eyes off me.

Hickstead Part I: The British Jumping Derby Meeting

If you were following the social networking feeds during the British Jumping Derby Meet you'll know that I was interning in The All England Jumping Course press office. Or if you follow any of my social newsfeeds then you'll also know because I didn't stop blabbing about it. Was far too cool and big a deal for me to ever shut up about! My main job was to be more behind the scenes and shoot specifically for the facebook page to give an idea of what life is like at Hickstead, though I did get a lot of opportunities to shoot some competition.

Customer Questionnaire

SMT Interview

I was interviewed by my friend for her Uni newspaper, St Mary's Telegraph, and she kindly gave me a copy of it. Thought I would share it for anyone who wanted to have a read!

Sorry for the quality, my scanner is a bit pants.

Thanks Hannah!

A rubbish guide to good photography: Horses

"Potentially good advice written poorly in the hopes it's useful to someone." 

I don't think I have once ever posted genuine photography advice and I think it's because I don't feel i'm in a position to do so. That only comes from a comparative point of view though. Comparatively I have far less experience than a lot of other photographers but then if I take that same opinion and flip it slightly, I have a lot more than others. So I thought "why not?" and here I am biting the bullet and sharing what knowledge I have.
Had you not already guessed from the title, this post is all focused on horses so if you're here for portraits or fashion then i'm sorry to disappoint. Perhaps i'll write about something more specific to those two areas another time.
So if you're ready to join Lotte's class of 2012 then you'll want to keep reading because all the useful parts of this blog will start at the end of this sentence. Or this sentence. Maybe it will never start because i'll just keep writing in more sentences. If I were you i'd just stop reading the rest of this paragraph and start reading the good stuff. Seriously if you've not skipped this bit I question your value of time.