New beginnings

This has been a long time coming. Not because I’ve spent a long time preparing, but because I’m a chronic procrastinator. It didn’t take very long in my life to realise my interest in photography and writing, so the combination of the two was a natural inevitability.

I have been taking photos in one form or another for some time now, starting out with a little Canon IXUS 500 that I used extensively in my youth until I purchased an iPhone 4. From that point, smartphone cameras were my only photographic equipment; I had not yet garnered the interest nor the means to pursue more expensive gear. I would still play around with my dad’s DSLRs from time to time, slowly learning about things such as ISO and shutter speed by naively fiddling with dials and observing what changed.

A few years and several iPhones later, I decided to take the next baby step and purchased a Canon PowerShot SX700 HS in preparation for my first trip to Japan. What drew me to this camera was its stabilisation and zoom - 30x optical - and proved to be a reliable workhorse for several years and many overseas trips. But of course I reached a point where I wanted more. I wanted to capture more. I wanted to show more.

A little over a year ago I took the plunge and bought my first interchangeable system, a Fujifilm X-T20. I had somehow managed to completely skip the DSLR era and went straight into mirrorless. Although I never had any experience with film cameras, the fact that this one looked like it was right out of the ‘80s inexplicably appealed to me. So there I was in the deep end, buying lenses, installing Lightroom, using RAWs for the first time, setting up backup solutions. This was a whole new world.

Now here I am, having taken thousands of photos and written barely anything but for a few annotations for social media. I want to tell the stories behind the images. I want to celebrate my achievements and reflect on my failures. I want to write those thousand words the pictures tell.

So what does Shashinsho mean?

It’s not exactly cryptic, but it is written in the wrong language. It’s a romanisation of the Japanese compound word 写真書, which effectively means “photo writing” or “photo book”. It’s probably a made up word, but as a wise Norse god once said, “All words are made up”.