Wow! Where has January gone? It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was up in Scotland for Xmas, I’m going back next week.

Towards the middle of January I had a very busy weekend, spending the Saturday at the SWPP convention in London with my Dad and some of his class mates from his photography course, the main thing I took away from the show was the motivation to try new options for displaying my images, especially printing to and stretching canvas and acrylics.

The Autosport show was great, it is always good to meet up with familiar faces, see all the cars and generally get excited for the 2010 season. The highlight for me was seeing the Ma5da Racing cars in the Live Action Arena, the live show itself was good, but seeing the MX-5s on track, entertaining the crowd, along with the likes of drift cars, Aston Martins, Jaguars and Jenson Button, even though the result, a win for Jonathan Blake in the mk3 was somewhat predictable!

I’ve finally got my wide angle lens, the Canon 17-40f4L, back from Fixation who were servicing it after it sacrificed itself to stop me getting a ski in the face at the Wham Bam Swad Jam last year and am looking forward to using it in Scotland next week.

That is pretty much all the photography news from me, the year has got off to a slow start, but I am looking forward to the rest of 2010 being very busy!

2009 started for me at a party with some of my closest school friends, it looks like it will end the same way, but it has been a busy year in between.

While I was at the party, my blog automatically published it’s first post, I’m a little disappointed that I only managed 25 posts this year, I was oping for at least double that, but I have got a lot of draft posts written, so 2010 should see a lot more posts, along with a slight tweak to to design to fit in with my Photoshelter site.

My main aim for 2009 had been to get images published in Autosport magazine, which I accomplished in April, on my first outing with a new camera (Canon EOS 1D mkII). The rest of the summer and into the autumn was a blur of motorsport photography mainly for Ma5da Racing, I will be their official photographer again in 2010, which with their increased grids and races for the newer mk3 MX-5s is shaping up to be an interesting and busy season.

Outside of photography things that have shaped my life in 2009 are music, I’m sat here writing this blog listening to Lily Allen’s set from a festival earlier in the year, she is certainly one of my artists of the year, a cracking album and possibly my favourite gig of the year when I saw her at the NIA. My favourite new (well new to me) artist is Frank Turner, a punk-folk singer songwriter, who never seems to stop touring, I saw him twice this year both at small intimate venues and as well as writing great songs with meaningful lyrics he seems like a nice bloke to boot!

For me the thing that has jumped out of nowhere this year is Twitter, I’ve chatted to some really great people who I may not have met otherwise and it is usually the first place I hear of any events, be they global stories or more specific to photography, I feel I’ve learnt a lot that I may not have otherwise found.

The last thing that has changed me for 2009 is hitting the gym again, after rupturing my ACL in 2008, my basic fitness level has improved no end, which has helped with lugging camera gear around race tracks, or walking into remote locations for landscape shots, but more importantly for me, it meant that 3 days ago I was able to ride my snowboard for the first time in over 18 months. On that note, I’m going to leave to computer and hit the gym.

I wish all my readers a happy and successful 2010.

PS sorry for the lack of photo in this post, if you’re lucky there may be a first picture of 2010 post tomorrow.