Domestifying photography

With the lockdown here to stay, it’s best to look at tasks and projects to keep yourself busy

- Michael Freeman

I write this column over a month before it reaches you, but it’s a fair guess that by this time many of us will be spending a little more time at home. For photographers, that’s a serious cramping of style, and this could go on for some time. Obviously, the strictures depend on where you live, but many of us are in cities – I certainly am, in the centre of London. I grew accustomed to blithely saying that one of the qualities that sets photography apart from some other creative pursuits, like writing and painting, is that you can’t do it from a chair. You have to get up and out, stretch those legs.

I may have been too hasty there, as now I’m going to be largely confined to my home, so compared with a few weeks in China, or elsewhere, my shooting horizons have definitely shrunk. Yours may too. There are a number of strategies for continuing with photography, however, and many of them have to do with catching up on stuffwe always meant to do, but didn’t quite make the time for. Like processing a backlog of Raw images, or doing some catalogue sorting, and admin tasks in general, for example. That’s fine, if not particularly adrenaline inducing. But we also need some creative strategies – or at least, paths…