Closing Out The Year

Tonight I’ll be flying out to Adelaide for a week. Another load of packing, another long haul flight, another long to-do list. It’s been that sort of a year.

This morning I closed my calendar for the next few months. I already have enough projects and commitments to keep me more than busy till the end of the year. In fact, the nine weeks between returning to Hong Kong and leaving for Christmas looks every so slightly overfull and frantic.

In the first week of November I’ll be going through a portfolio review with Ami Vitale (through The Compelling Image). Ami is an extraordinary photographer and and right now I’m struggling (and to be honest, slightly panic-stricken) over which images to submit for review.

There’s also a very exciting event coming up in November that will showcase some images from the Ladakh trip, but in a way that is a little different to the usual gallery show. Hopefully, I can put up some details early next week.

Type-Savvy readers have probably noticed small changes in the blog design. I’ve recently switched to using Typekit, a fantastic service that simplifies a lot of issues involved with delivering good type on a website. My big project for January is a major site redesign. The blog will remain and continue with the same topics and tone. But, I will be adding a gallery, audio players and an offer page for the album (and other goodies). Right now the pieces are mostly in place (Graph Paper Press themes, Typekit fonts, SoundCloud player), but a few things are missing (like a photo gallery host) and December is the time to make some decisions on those.

Long-suffering readers of this blog are probably wondering about the status of my solo album. Well, a big part of the reason for locking out these coming weeks is to set the studio up for that project. It’s been a great year, but all the chopping and changing has made it hard to focus on completing this project. I set myself some targets earlier, but missed them because I let too many other things in at the same time.

Although it’s not the time of year for this sort of thing, I’d like to say thank you right now to all my regular readers and to the new visitors I’ve had over the last few months. I realise that my writing has been irregular and sporadic of late – with a lot of posts about creative angst and the struggles of living in Hong Kong. So, thank you for being patient with me, and this blog (which, as always, is a work in progress). Hopefully there will be some good things to share as the year comes to a close.