Friends. Photography. Adventure.
Last August I was reunited with Tabitha after 2.5 years. We ate, we drank, we talked nineteen to the dozen. When we took a lazy paddle down the stream near her house the opportunity for naked photos was too good to miss. Here Daisy the dog wanted in on the action and photobombed the shot.
I think many of us who’ve been blogging for a long time have had that experience of coming up with a title and then having the URL say xxx-2 because we’ve used it before. That happened to me in September when I posted this shot. I had forgotten all about the original Hanging Out!
Last night I was hanging out with Focused and Filthy and hubby and just look at the chair that’s the centrepiece in their AirBnb. For chair prompt week we had to do Hanging Out 3!
I went to see the Bill Brandt exhibition at Tate Britain today. It’s free and on till January 2023 so if you’re in London at all I recommend it.
I love Bill Brandt. I can’t remember exactly when I first saw his work but it was probably during university in the mid-nineties and it was certainly his (and Man Ray’s) work that first got me interested in nude photography.
After getting back from the exhibition I scrolled back through my blog and through my unused photos folder and it’s quite ridiculous how often I’ve channeled him, either through direct replicas or through heavily influenced black and whites.
In the unused folders were a couple of homages dating back to my lockdown project in 2020. Brandt had a habit of naming his images by the location and date they were taken so here I have done the same. The shot that inspired mine is below.
Last weekend I had a couple of nights away in a beautiful cabin which came with its own wild swimming pond and this dreamy hanging chair. It was perfect! I rarely go back to places but I’ll definitely return to this one.
On Thursday I was finally reunited with the incredible Tabitha Rayne. The last time I saw her was Sunday 15th March 2020 in that frenzied period leading up to lockdown. I would be the last non-family member she’d hug for months and I wouldn’t touch another human until June. We’d wonder about the weirdness of that quite often in those early days.
On that last weekend we snapped a photo of Tabitha up tree in Crystal Palace Park. Over the years we’ve had some incredible photo adventures, from woodland adventures to London buses to car wrecks.
Neither one of us is really feeling the photography and blogging thing at the moment so we agreed that we’d just hang out and catch up this time. We don’t know ourselves at all do we? A Friday morning drift along the river in Tabitha’s boat was just too good an opportunity to miss.
“A light here required a shadow there.” Virginia Woolf.
I absolutely love this photo. It’s from back in summer 2020 when me and this chap would guiltily giggle about breaking the law with our lusty lockdown liaisons. If only we’d known what was going on a few miles away at Number 10! Still, the covert sexy bubble was a lot of fun so I’m happy for our ignorance.
Anyway, the grip. Isn’t it funny how some partners can do things that feel completely different to when another does exactly the same thing? Other people grip my throat and I like it a lot but there’s something about the way he grips it that radiates tingles down my whole body. Is it the size of his hand or the particular pressure he applies? I don’t know but I love it when he does it.
I’ve thought about posting this photo a few times over the last couple of years but I’ve always dismissed it, thinking it wasn’t a ‘good’ photo because of the bleaching from the back light. But suddenly with this weekend’s prompt it’s just perfect.
There’s been a shift this last week or so hasn’t there? On Thursday I went out for a walk in the woods after work. The carpet of wild garlic had expanded, the birds were noisy, the buds are beginning to burst and best of all it was still light.
Yesterday I spent the day in London, starting at the Tate Britain then walking along the river and over Westminster Bridge to the Royal Festival Hall and the WOW festival. I was coat-free for the first time this year and at times it felt something close to warm in the sun. This morning I was woken by the birds – another first for this year.
With the lighter days and regreening of the outside world I can also feel my desire for photo adventures unfurling. Whereas a couple of months ago I was thinking ‘ah, maybe I’m done with the blog, I’m all out of ideas’, I’m now thinking ‘oooh, let’s get planning’. I’m excited for day trips with Haiku, group outings with the gang, more adventures with the chap in this photo and, hopefully, like last year, there’ll be some new faces on the blog.
If we’re mutuals and you’ve always fancied an E40 outdoor photo adventure, let me know. I’d also like to spend more time in front of other people’s cameras. And I need to come up with some new location ideas. The woods and beach will always be my first loves but I think I need a new location with viaduct level wow factor. Any ideas?
I’m writing this from the lounge at Mauritius airport, waiting for a night flight home. I didn’t think I could let the last day go past without a photo so here’s a quick snap from the beach earlier.
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