A Year on the East Hill: Half way there
Summer is done, which means I am now half way through my project to photograph Hastings East Hill over the course of a year, from April 2024 to March 2025, when I will be 60 years old.
As usual, I didn’t photograph much during the summer. The heat is too much for long walks with heavy equipment, and the light is often simply too harsh and all the pictures end up looking the same. I’m not an early morning or late evening walker, my preference is to be out in the middle of the day, and often this is not a good time for photographing during the summer.
But I made enough pictures that the final project will not feel unbalanced, summer will be represented.
Half way through, what is my main take from the project so far? Probably predictably, that the year is going awfully fast. It really doesn’t feel like more than a few weeks since I began this. Second, despite the intention (described in this post) to shoot a lot of this project using my 10 x 8 view camera, in truth it has come out rarely. It’s too heavy, and my enthusiasm to carry it up and down hills has not been there through the summer. If I can’t drum up the urge to carry it through the autumn, this project will all be medium format, using the much more portable Mamiya 645, and the 10 x 8 will definitely be sold. I love large format, but I suspect my days of shooting anything larger than 5 x 7 are now gone.
It is now a few months since the end of spring, so I can now begin the process of coming up with a tighter selection of my spring photographs. Enough time has passed that I have enough distance from them to be able to judge them relatively dispassionately. This is the part of a project I like the most. The final edit won’t happen until after the end of shooting, but the parameters of how it might look are now coming into view. Progress is being made, and the project can begin the process of forming its narrative.
I love these
Enjoying this Ian,looking forward to reading more and seeing the final selection.