It’s raining outside. Again. I’m not going out to take pictures. I’ve been quite remiss over the last few months and have only got the camera out occasionally. I can blame some of that one the fact we’ve had a few guests, some of it on DIY necessities, a bit of it blamed on the weather (and midges) and quite a healthy dose of the blame lies with my general laziness. Then again, when it’s raining outside it’s hard to motivate oneself to get out of the house. I started to wonder what other photographers did when they were trapped inside. A brief survey of colleagues raised a few interesting results. Quite a few played instruments, there are a few crafty folks making things out of wood etc, some are painters. Some have outdoorsy hobbies that are rain compatible - they might cycle, run, swim or train indoors. Since moving up to Scotland both Charlotte and I have ended up climbing regularly (indoors and outdoors) and it’s a rare week where Charlotte doesn’t swim in the sea Loch near our house. I was a bit frustrated with my lack of recent photography at first, especially about the lack of 365 output (http://www.lochaber365.com), but I realised that without a significant effort to change things, our passions have a cyclical nature. I looked back at my photographic output in previous years and noticed that there are peak and troughs, Autumn and Winter are obvious peaks, but there are also just general periods where creativity flows better and getting motivated becomes easy. There is also a lot to be said for momentum in these cycles. If you’re getting out regularly it’s easier to continue and if you haven’t been out for a while, it’s often hard to get going again. We have a forecast nice period coming up and all of our guests have left so I’m hoping to get into the flow of things again in the coming weeks, wish me luck! And don’t worry if you’re not feeling it like I haven’t been - it’ll come back given time and just get your creative kicks doing something else for a while.

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