Hello World!

Welcome to my blog! This page is quite like a scrapbook, with photos thrown in from various aspects of my life in the next year or so. There will be lots of pictures; lots of colour, form, shape, and stories to tell. To guide you in your enjoyment of the pictures, text will be provided. However you could also make an abstract essay on each and every one. It's completely up to you.

So why have I started writing a blog? Why this format?

My first reason is that one of my big hobbies is photography, and I wish to integrate it more into my life. Just before my 19th birthday my parents and I went on holiday in Portugal. I took an old bridge camera with me - a little Fujifilm Finepix - and started snapping up much of the landscape. Dad noticed that I had some pretty neat photos in there: sharp little two-dimensional representations of a great holiday. When we got home he decided that it was time for an upgrade. He grabbed a Canon 300D with a kit lens off Ebay for a hundred and fifty quid and that became my birthday present. After a year of landscapes, portraiture and an article in the student newspaper, I'd say it's been pretty good. The camera was a blessing. I was never that good at writing artistically, but with a camera I was empowered to document one's life in a vibrant and candid manner. Such is the beauty of photography, to make art out of the mundane nature of daily life. 

My second reason is that I've never really wrote a blog before (because having not tried something is always a reason to try it). When I read those blogs created by my friends, and by people such as the Sartorialist, I felt it might be a fun idea to start blogging myself. Conveniently it will be my last year as an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge. Whilst I will never have the transition from wide-eyed fresher to wise finalist stored in the vast repository of the internet, I can provide a memory to what I hope will be one of the best years of my life. My camera will help me in this respect. Fingers crossed!

If it could be considered a third reason, I would like to develop the ability to write well. In the past I used to saturate my writings with adjectives and complex sentences. It was a lack of awareness, perhaps, that good writing need not burden itself with a ridiculous quantity of long, complex words that trip over each other and induce intellectual spasm in the brain. It was also probably just because I was young. In either case, an improvement will be needed somewhere down the line. Hopefully this can be done before my mind is lost to the realm of scientific prose: although as sharp as obsidian in getting the point across, it is as dull as lead to read.

So here I am, keyboard and camera in hand. We've got the holidays to begin with - a nice little run up in Glasgow where life is relaxed and the alcohol comes cheap. If this blog survives till October, then we could deal with the cacophony of Cambridge. 

Hello World!