Keeping up with myself and losing the battle

For those few of you that keep up to date with me, good luck.  I can not even keep up with myself at times.  I have many projects on the go, some of which are all about using my lucky and very fortunate situation as an Army photographer.  The British Army is a diverse place, there are opportunities everywhere but many will inevitably fall outside of the job description.  So for these I operate in my own time.  I know (or I have a better idea) where I want my photography to go, I can kind of see the future (and for a ginger, it may just be Orange after all).  When I embarked on this career, I was honest with myself and admitted it was a resettlement course, only I began with 14 years left to do.

As any kind of photographer, you are always looking around at the world around you, the influences you can draw on and the ideas others have, constantly wondering if you can improve something.

Going back to projects, I enjoy working in the studio, with people.  I was also incredibly proud of the country during and after the huge success of the London Olympics.  Those that don’t know, the first gold medal of the games for Team GB came on the water with a member of the British Armed Forces.

I do wonder if the Armed forces themselves have started to be taken for granted a little.  As we ride a wave of public support, the like of which I have never known, we seem to be in the media all the time, thankfully most of the time in a positive light.  This is largely down to our enduring involvement in Afghanistan, but as an organisation we seem so integrated into the public field of vision that it is hard to see it ending soon.  On the other hand, with Afghanistan coming ever closer to a draw down, I wonder if the limelight is about to fade.  Over all I have to say, as biased as I so obviously am, we have done ourselves proud.  We have once again shown ourselves to be professional, resilient and the definition of reliability.  Sure there have been failures, but these do happen.  We are only human after all (this is not meant to demonstrate any kind of apathy over these failures as some have been very disturbing).

As part of the Army PR machine, our role is to do what we can to assist the organisation in showing off its good points.

So as I continue to ramble on, I have embarked on a personal project to photograph Army representative sports people to help show that as an organisation, the competitive nature of the job we do does have civilian applications too.  The British Military is a huge investor in sports which will inevitably keep our exploits in the public eye.

This image is a very quick edit on this project and is far from a final image.  The sport is Biathlon, one of the most physically demanding sports I think there is. Not so much from the exertion the athlete must endure but the fact that during this exertion they then have to hit a tiny target with a rifle at 50 meters while their lungs are trying to escape them through their mouths.

Before I depart I must add that any views in this blog are my own views and should not be seen as any kind of representation of the Ministry of Defence or the British Army.