During COVID it was not possible to travel as much as I had been doing. I therefore confined myself to walks in the immediate vicinity of my house and started a series of photographs, which with my usual lack of inspiration I decided to call “Around the Neighborhood”. I defined this as meaning anywhere that I could walk back and forth to from my house.

I intended to make a photo book out of these these photographs, but it quickly became apparent that I risked having too many pictures for a single photo book. Also there was a danger that the task of selecting appropriate pictures, processing, editing, sequencing etc. would become so overwhelming that I would become paralyzed and not produce anything at all.

For a while I had wanted to try producing a Zine and this seemed like a good time to finally get around to it. I therefore decided that instead of a single photo book I would try instead to create a series of Zines. This is the first in this series.

The subject is a single tree in a nearby woodland. I’d already taken a number of pictures of it but on this occasion I decided on the spur of the moment to attempt an exercise that I’d recently read about. This exercise consisted of taking thirty six photographs of a single subject all at once (See: A Photographic Exercise).

Quite easy at first, but after about twenty photographs increasingly more difficult. In fact at that point I almost gave up, but I stuck with it and in the end found it to be quite useful. I’m the kind of person who will walk up to a subject, take a few pictures and then move on. This exercise made me slow down and look more carefully. Indeed, towards the end I was noticing things, which I had already walked past a couple of times.