Welcome to 2015!

Happy New Year!

With a challenging end to 2014 behind us, I’m looking forwards to discovering what exciting times lie ahead for us in 2015.

It’s going to be a year of change for a start – with Sam turning 4, Ellie’s second birthday in the Summer and of course reaching the milestone of Sam starting school later in the year. There are also some major changes on the way which I can’t talk about yet, but am looking forwards to! All will be revealed in due course.

2014 was a great year for my photographic business, shooting more weddings than previous years along with much more commercial work. I was also lucky enough to be able to take the time out to join two incredible workshops during the year – one focused squarely on improving my off-camera flash technique and the other led by an awesome Norfolk photographer (Ross Harvey), who currently holds the acolade of being recognised as one of the world’s best wedding photographers. Both of these have helped to completely change how I approach many areas of my photography and I look forwards to sharing more of my images with you as the year gets underway.

2014 was also the year in which the modern age of internet connectivity finally arrived in our rural Norfolk village of Brooke. Since ADSL was first launched in the village we’ve been stuck with BT’s ancient ADSL MAX service, offering paltry speeds of about 6Mbs download & 400Kbs upload. Barely pasable for web browsing in a household where BBC iPlayer could be regarded as an essential component of daily life; and absolutely useless when trying to upload photos to online galleries or websites. For good measure, our local exchange was then skipped over due to “limited demand” for BT’s 21C network which would have bought ADSL2 and faster speeds to the village so it was well and truely time for a change…

Despite setting and missing a variety of dates for rollout plans ranging from end of 2013 through to June 2014, Openreach finally enabled our local exchange and cabinets for FTTC at the end of December – with our line being upgraded just before Christmas and leaping from 6Mb/0.4 to around 38Mbs/10Mbs. A definite improvement for all concerned.

I’ve also reached the conclusion that it’s time for a change in terms of this blog. I’ve not posted much over the last few months, mainly as I’ve simply not had the time to give the website the focus it needs in terms of building a new theme, customising Ghost, and bolting on various other bits and pieces. As such, while I love the simplicity and sheer speed Ghost has to offer I’m planning to migrate the site back to WordPress. Despite being a much more mature and perhaps bloated product, WP does have the massive advantage of powering around 20% of all websites currently on the Internet – and as such, has a huge ecosystem surounding it in terms of themes & plugins which Ghost simply doesn’t currently have. Suspect it isn’t going to be a simple migration by all accounts, but will post something on here when I get started.

Update: Here’s a guide for migrating a site back to WordPress, from Ghost.

All in all, it’s been an exceptionally busy start to the year and I’m quite looking forwards to getting on with the rest of January now that the first couple of weeks are out of the way.

Here’s to a great 2015!!

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