This post introduces three new photographic portfolios, and additions to a fourth. It’s been a busy month, working through my back catalogue, editing and refining my images, making initial selections and then culling, culling, to the point where I feel I have a collection of images that is coherent, of sufficiently high quality, and hopefully of interest to others - meaning, you.

Three of the portfolios - Photographs from Home, Madikwe - Wildlife Photographs, and A Sense of Place - are each, in their own way, photographs of home - home, in the sense of where I grew up, the place that formed me, the sights and sounds and tones and colours that are in my bones.

Photographs from Home is a selection of just twelve colour images, landscapes and seascapes, made at different times and in different parts of South Africa. They do not pretend to be typical or representative; rather they are, for me, a kind of emotional reading of place and memory.

Madikwe - Wildlife Photographs, on the other hand, collects in one place colour as well as black-and-white wildlife photographs I have taken over several years and maybe half-a-dozen visits to the Madikwe Game Reserve in the far north-west corner of South Africa, up against the Botswana border - undoubtedly our favourite amongst all the game reserves we have visited. The viewing is spectacular, and the experience magical. These images represent, I think, the best of the many hundreds of photographs I have taken in this special place, providing, I hope, not just a record of animals and their behaviour but - again - a spirit of place.

A Sense of Place adds a few images to a previously-published black-and-white portfolio of South African landscapes - additions from my long trawl through the archives.

The fourth portfolio, A Week in Plaisance, is a departure, in more senses than one. Taken on a family holiday in rural Aveyron, in the south-east of France, the photographs are an attempt, amid a mountain of holiday snaps, to express something else - a sense of place (again), something of the region’s history and culture, and - everywhere - the influence of the church.

Apart from curating - I word I mistrust, actually - my photographs, and preparing them for publishing online on my website, August has also been a month in which I celebrated my 69th birthday, and a month in which Rob and I, after evading the damn bug for years, have finally caught Covid. We have been fortunate, though, if that is the word, to have got it after the really nasty, earliest versions of the disease have (we hope) disappeared, and after we had received our fourth booster shots. So the experience has been unpleasant, rather than critical, and after a week or so we seem well over the worst.

The message I take from all this - memories of home, photography, birthdays and pandemics - is familiar and simple: you gotta live while you’re alive.

Which I plan on doing.

Take care, keep well.