Phil Ferris Photography

I have taken photographs across many years, while people may recall seeing me in my local area with a camera in my hand, far fewer saw the results.

Whatever you do, do it with passion and do it for yourself, I had read and heard.

Fair enough, but does it have to be solely for yourself?

Isn’t art a process of creation and sharing? Isn’t photography art? (Hang on, I am not going down that rabbit hole.)
I can do the create, the sharing? not so well, till now.

I have been toying with how to show what I have done. I have scattered photos haphazardly across various social media but that is just it, the random aspect just doesn’t feel right. If I am going to do this, I need to do it properly I told myself, about 10 years ago. A few years later I picked up a web address and promptly parked it while I thought about how I use it. I tried a blog, and used the odd photo, but this didn’t satisfy the creative itch. I took another few years before deciding I definitely needed to do something (and that the itch wasn’t something more concerning) and would just take a few years more to be sure.

A series of bereavements especially the last 5 months, along with a series of wake up calls from various parts of the internet had me asking, like Jamie Lee Curtis “If not now, when?” (Though without the deportment or full head of hair).

And here we are. The start of a website, (with an emphasis on start, being that it already needs reorganisation) and the public display if my photos.

This site is not a sales pitch, I know it has something of the feel of a “Hire me, hire me!” new photographer site but it really is supposed to be a gallery, a place to share what I see, those things that catch my eye. I do not do commissions, I photograph that which interests me. I want to get better at this wonderful hobby, I believe that sharing my results will spur me on to improve and the site will hold me to this.

Photography is meditation, whatever thoughts might assail me, whatever is going on, all of the interference gets turned down to zero when I take pictures.

In closing this inaugural entry I want to mention Chis Orwig, who had a wonderful description of what a camera is, he was on an edition of the http://www.photowalk.show, (a beautiful podcast made by Neale James with the passion I hope to show in what I do eventually). Chris referred to the camera being a Gratitude Engine – that taking the picture is an indication of the gratitude we have for the scene before us. How wonderful is that!