Title • time marches on

When I was a kid, I remember getting up in the morning and feeling as though the day would last forever – hours and hours in which to live a lifetime, yet still be home for tea. These days, or so it seems, all I need to do is blink and the day is gone.

Which leads me on to some of the points you all raised yesterday ...

When I started chromasia, it was a hobby, and all the spare time I had could be given over to being creative: thinking about new shots, trying out new techniques, and so on. As chromasia became more popular we started getting some 'proper' photographic work, some of which I've posted here. More recently we've been doing more and more commercial work so made the decision to run chromasia full-time, not least because doing two full-time jobs was becoming totally unmanageable. One of the things that helped us make that decision was the commission for the baby book; i.e. it was guaranteed work – money in the bank, and so on.

The downside of the project is that we've had very little time to do anything else and all I've been posting is baby shots. And yes, they're not as creative as some of my other work, nor as inspiring, nor as interesting. But that's just the way it is at the moment. When this project is finished I have one more job to do which will run till the end of March. After that – touch wood – I'll have loads more time to get back to doing more varied and interesting work. And I suspect that I'm looking forward to it even more than you are.

Anyway, I should have been writing the book today, but went out for a while instead and got four shots that I'm happy with. They're not earth-shatteringly original, but at least they're a change. I do still have some baby shots to take, that I may interleave with these ones, but at least these four will make a bit of a change.

As an aside, I was reading miklos's comment on yesterday's entry as I was working on this one and thought that it might class as one of the "attractively photoshopped images" he mentioned. Anyway, I'd been working on it for about an hour (mostly because I was trying various monochrome versions as well) and decided to check the histogram ... which was a big mistake. I'm using CS3 at the moment, and have discovered a bug; i.e. under certain circumstances switching to the histogram palette will crash the programme. And I know this, because it's happened at least three times prior to today. Anyway, as I clicked the palette I suddenly remembered that this would probably crash Photoshop. Worse though, I suddenly remembered that in the hour I'd been working on the image I hadn't saved it once. Luckily I managed to get a screen grab before it vanished and then spent the next 30 minutes recreating it.

So, for all sorts of reasons (book, programme crashes, book, life, and yes, the book), you're lucky to get this shot and not another cute baby. And, in case it isn't obvious, this is a worn piece of metalwork on one of the groyne's at Cleveley's (Just north of Blackpool).

Oh, and if anyone dares to complain that a) I'm shooting in my comfort zone by just going down to the beach, or b) that I'm not being original and inspiring, I'll hunt them down like a dog ;-)