I am Sally Ann, a self-employed, self-styled ‘housewife superstar’ and a keen amateur photographer. I live in the middle of England, but we have travelled to various other photogenic countries 🙂 I’ve been using a Pentax SLR camera since my mid-20’s and despite it’s bulkiness, still try to carry it everywhere.  I’ll usually regret leaving it at home if I don’t bother, because 9 times out of 10 there’s something that catches my eye – and I haven’t yet got a decent camera phone.

I’m no professional and freely admit that since going digital I do have the camera set on automatic most of the time. But lack of technique doesn’t matter quite so much since iPhoto opened up the world of editing one’s own shots and with no-one to please but myself plus the ease and economic sense of digital, I can risk strange and arty compositions just for the fun of it.  I’ve always loved taking pictures of everything I see, from animals to landscapes, architecture to sunsets, cities to seascapes… I love a good composition or a quirky reflection, an unsuspecting child or the colour of bricks – but most of all I love the light!

I do also have a huge record of family events, yellowing prints stuck in albums stretching back over more than 50 years… From old black and whites of me as an infant purloined from the box in my father’s loft, via schooldays captured on my first instamatic, to a 1980’s wedding and the growing pains of 2 children – whose every antic was, of course, lovingly recorded. In the days before video and digital we wondered if the people at the ‘send away for developing and get a free film back’ company who received the rolls were keeping tabs on what the family was up to this week!  Even after digital started to take over and the images came on CDs I still printed out a few favourites for the joy of having a book of the latest trip or holiday to peruse and share with friends… but by 2008 the costs and time became prohibitive and it lapsed. The record-keeping mania has been successfully transferred onto my MacBook – and back-up disc!

Wanting to enjoy some of this archive again I thought Timepiece would be a perfect on-line gallery for some hand-picked favourite photos – mostly taken over the past 6 years. It’s not easy to make a daily choice from the thousands I really like, so I’ll make each post have a connection – however tenuous! – with the one before… like a word association game with my memories. I’m using the comment section to tell you what the link is and where the photo was taken, so that the sequence of images on the home page can be viewed without interruption… after all, they say a picture is worth 1000 words!