Moving Mountains
Photographs and more, by Tom Phillips
So, what's new then?
I've frequently heard it said that the optimist is the person who believes we live in the best of all possible worlds, while the pessimist is the person who fears that this is true. Count this Home Page as a first very tentative step towards the optimist camp.
This site hasn't had much attention from me in the last couple of years, I'm afraid. At the time, there were always good reasons why it was so low on my "to do" list that it repeatedly missed out. Suffice it to say that several bouts of illness were mostly to blame, but they (unhelpfully) came along in the immediate post-Covid pandemic world, just when we were all looking forward to "things getting back to normal". Many of us found that they didn't, wouldn't, or couldn't.
I'm sure I'm not the only run of the mill freelance photographer to be hit very hard by said pandemic. However, not to put to fine a point on it, my business model, and the way I'd been working for the previous twelve years or so, was simply wiped out by several different aspects of how society decided to react to Covid. On top of that came a major downturn in my personal health. I'm glad to say that I avoided catching Covid, but other illness meant that I was unable to continue taking part in several activities which had become major to my life. Without my health, and without sport and travel I was unable to function as a jobbing photographer like I used to.
Thus, this web site sat idle, with no new content, and its existing material rapidly ageing. Requests for material from my older work and archives eventually dried up, proving that, even for photographers, you're only as good as your last gig.
I'm not pulling the plug on the site immediately, though. My plan is to leave what you find there at present (ie this apologetic Home page plus my main galleries, with the warning that they are out of date), while life (especially mine) slowly continues to get back to a better semblance of "normal".
If you have any special requests for stuff that you think used to be on the site, but isn't any longer, the "Contact Me" link at the foot of each page still works.
Tom
