2017 in Review — Matt McGarr Photography

A photo from my 1st shooting day of 2017

A photo from my last day shooting of 2017

2017 was my first year without college since I went to college. The first year that I would have no assignments, classmates, teachers, deadlines, commuting, workbooks and so on and on and on. If I'm honest, it made me realise that I miss college. For a few reasons. The first one being that I liked it. I hadn't engaged with high school at all and left with very average grades. Going back in my 30s to do something I loved changed that. I was good at it and studied hard. I got 96% in my final project, which if you'd known me in my teens would seem an insane concept.

The other reason I missed college was that I couldn't hide anymore. "I'll do it once I graduate" wasn't something I could say to put off building a website, or putting myself out there and contacting people to say I was available to work. I didn't need to concentrate on full time education anymore. It was scary! College is 'safe'. It's hard work and ruinously expensive these days of course but still safe Everyone is there to help you. The worst that'll happen if you hand in sub-standard work is that they'll ask you to re-submit something else a few weeks later. That's not the case out the real world. The worst that can happen is that you could get sued for something! That's unlikely, I'll agree, but the stakes are higher and the support all but gone. It takes a bit of getting used to as I'm sure a load of graduates (especially those who studied creative industries) would agree.

I decided to do this little look back at 2017 as I had been thinking that it was quite a frustrating year. I'm not swimming in filthy lucre yet, so there's that. And there there were the usual highs and lows of working in a creative field. Some days you can't get enough and the next, you feel like a failure and that you've bet on the wrong horse. Which is an issue, when you're the horse. I knew it would take time to start a business and grow it into something that pays all the bills and other things too so I was prepared to play the long game. But over the course of a year there were swings from being optimistic about where I was headed and back again to wondering if I should just study finance and be done with it.

But as I thought about it more, I realised that it had been a pretty good year. Personally and professionally. So I figured that writing it all down so I could read and re-read it would help me appreciate what I did do in 2017. So here it is:

I started a huge project. In the pie chart of my time spent doing photography related things, this project is at least two thirds of the pie. In fact it has taken up so much time that it's odd to think that I only started it this year. It will be covered in (much!) more detail as time goes on but I'll give a little preview here.

The project is documenting the behind the scenes goings on of the Rosyth District Musical Society amateur dramatics company putting on their annual show. I'm not into amateur dramatics but my sister is. She was cast as the lead in a production of "Sweet Charity" and I saw that as my way in to document something I knew very little about. I photographed the show and have returned this again to do the next one. A quick tally tells me I've taken 3720 photographs so far. So it's extensive. With the new show (The Wedding Singer) we're still only early in the process so there's much (much!) more to do before I make everything public but I can share a few shots here.

Without going into a full write up here, I will say that this has been great fun and really far exceeded my expectations about what I was going to get when I first thought of the idea.

I shot some film. Film photography for me is one of those things I like the idea of more than the actual experience. I love film cameras and using them is a joy but the convenience of digital really is hard to get past. But this year I decided I would spend more time using film as a bit of fun. But the perils of film photography in the modern age soon became apparent and I don't even have a photo to share. One roll chewed by the camera, another can't be processed by Boots (the biggest chemist chain in Britain) so I'm not sure if I'll ever see what I got there. The one roll I did manage to get was more of a test roll and at £7 a pop, it was an expensive test at that. So at the moment, I have 2 undeveloped rolls of film (one I can't get developed) and another half used one in a camera. So that little experiment was short lived, which is a shame. It's here that I really miss the college. They had the facilities there, so if you wanted film developed, you dropped it into a box and your negatives were waiting for you the next day. Maybe one day I'l be able to develop at home but that won't be happening for a while. I had almost forgotten about my brief daliance with film photography until I started writing this blog. I might get developed what I can and put the special roll somewhere safe for the future.

I think this issue is where my confusion about this year started. As I looked through my 2017 library in Lightroom, I realised that there weren't too many photos taken for fun. They were work or projects that I had committed to. I wondered if I had let the fun aspect of things slide away. Then I remembered that I had been doing the film stuff for fun and that it hadn't worked out the way I'd hoped. So actually that was nowhere near as bleak as I first thought. I just didn't have the photographs there in my Lightroom library next to the rest of the photos. Still, that gives me something to work on. Whether it's finding a more reliable/cheaper film developer or simply switching back to digital for recreational photography.

I photographed my house. Well it's not my house anymore. That's kind of the point. I've written about this already so won't go into it again. But what I will say is that things like this make my thankful I discovered photography when I did. I'm not sure how I'd look back on things like this if I didn't have photographs to back up those memories.

I photographed my sister's wedding. My little sister, got married in Sorrento, Italy. It was a small wedding and I was there as photographer. It was so small that my own fiance, Pamela, didn't make the guest list and I would be in Italy without her.

Despite not throwing myself into the wedding photography business, I have to say that I've enjoyed doing it and despite it not being quite second nature to me yet, I've come away with photographs I can be happy with.

I've had two holidays. Can hardly believe those words as I say them. The first was, of course, to Italy and my sister paid for that which meant that Pamela and I could go to Croatia for a week in September. It was lovely and as is so often the case when people go to Croatia, we're looking at going back again soon.

The week in Italy without Pamela meant I could spend more time taking photographs than I usually do on holiday (I love you, darling!) which was nice. I'm sure I've spoken before about splitting time between holidaying and photographing so it was a pleasant change to be somewhere new and be free to go whatever I wanted. I might start holidaying on my own more often!

Needless to say, I came back from both holidays with tons of photos and will write them both up at some point soon.

So yeah, looking back at 2017 it was a pretty productive year (and there was plenty that I left out as well). There is always room for improvement, though and I look forward to seeing what comes from 2018. Plans are to catch up with my blogging (the fact that I have 5 started-but-not-finished blog entries waiting for me to get my finger out was one of the motivations for doing this entry), get some of my massive RDMS project out for people to see, and to get more work! Projects are important but at the end of the day, I studied photography at college to one day (soon!) pay my way through life with a camera in my hand. That's the part that I need to get sorted in 2018.

I think the other big thing that I need to sort on 2018 is my head. When I first started this blog, one of the goals was to push me along now that I didn't have college to do the pushing and to try fill the hole that finishing college would leave. I knew that without the briefs, discussions and generally being immersed in all things photography that I'd stop living and breathing it. And that's happened (and isn't all that bad a thing, tbh). I've done things this year and left the camera at home to enjoy the activity for what it was. Something unheard of over the last 2 years. At times I've wondered if that meant I was falling out of love with photography or suffering burnout (before I started the course, I was terrified that college would make me sick of photography). But of course it's not the case. Once free of the requirements of full time education, I think it's only natural to want to slow things down for a while. To find a pace that suits me and not just the education board. At times I think I've swung too far in the wrong direction when I'm quiet and got distracted by other things whether it's video games or movies or whatever. But that's all part of finding the balance. I was good at cutting out most distractions when I started college so I'm confident that as I get busier and the need for distractions lessens, that I can cut them out again. Fingers crossed, I suppose!

If you've read this far; thanks, well done and hope you have a great 2018.

Matt