What a year 2012 has been, not only due to the jubilee and London Olympics, but personally I’ve had a great year of holidays, road trips and working on interesting projects, both at home and at work.

The highlight of the year was in February when Jen and I spent two weeks in Costa Rica, I really upped my game surfing (I’m sure warm water and perfect waves helped a lot), we did all the touristy things, saw loads of wildlife ranging from spiders to whales and ate some amazing food!

After a few weekends away in Norfolk and the North West our next holiday was down to Croyde in Devon with some friends, we rented pretty much my dream house and although it rained a lot and the surf was non existent, we had a great week and I can’t wait to go back in 2013. For me the highlight was a road trip to Minehead on the A39 over Exmoor, where I managed to take one of my favourite shots of the year, which I still need to print for Ali! The week ended with meeting Jen’s friend from uni who was back in the UK, from Australia, for a few days, then meeting up with my best friend who had just moved back from Cyprus. From the start of our search in April, we still haven’t managed to find him a new car, certainly a priority for 2013!

Also around the time we went to Croyde was the start of the biggest personal project I’ve been involved in – the 119 project! Jen and I are buying, renovating then moving into her granddad’s house in Coventry. We’re planning on turning this mid terraced house last decorated in the 1970s into our home, we’ve done a lot in 2012, but still haven’t been able to move in, mainly due to my flat in Rugby not selling (if anyone wants to buy a nice 2 bedroom flat in Rugby get in touch with David at Brown and Cockerill). Before our next trip I also managed to fit in visits to the Cholmondeley Pageant of Power with my Dad and the Rally of the Midlands, which was great for photography, after a few years away from motorsports. I also had a business trip to Japan, after an urgent issue cropped up on a project I thought I’d put to bed a few years ago!

The next big trip I went on with Jen was one I had been planning for quite a while – a road trip to the Isle of Lewis, the MX-5 performed brilliantly, we both had a great week and ate way too much nice food! This is where my blogging for the year tailed off, as the rest of the year involved a lot of work on the house/flat with only a couple of Pistonheads Sunday Services at Aston Martin (where I didn’t take any pictures) and the Ferrari Race Day at Silverstone (where I reacquainted myself with photography at Silverstone) and a trip to York (to celebrate the ten year anniversary of Jen starting university there) to break up the DIY, hence the lack of blogging!

The year finished up with a trip to my parents place in Perth for Christmas and as Santa seemed to think I’d been a good boy this year he brought me a GoPro camera, so stand by for my movie debut on the blog next year!

Happy new year!

Lewis

For a while one of my photography goals has been to get accepted to the Alamy stock agency, I particularly wanted to get accepted as they are a proper agency, rather than microstock and they are pretty strict about who gets in, with your images having to pass a stringent QC test.

To view my images click on the links below:

Stock photography by Lewis Craik at Alamy

My favourite image of the four from my initial upload was this image of Kinnoull Tower near Perth, Scotland:

In addition to this blog, I will be contributing to the new for 2010 Racing Exposure e-zine, which focuses on UK club level motorsport. My articles will mainly be about Ma5da Racing, and associated BRSCC series, with probably a bit of Britcar thrown in.

You can read my articles on Racing Exposure or subscribe to the RSS feed.

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.