"People love to read personal life stories"I hope it is true although I think everything we wrote is in some ways a very personal interpretation of our small world. Intimate is may be the other way to say it. So, writing about something that is closer to us can be easier to associate us because it is a more accessible life experience.
In retrospect of the recent years, I have found that time have a tendency to accelerate by itself or it may be that our time references are beginning to contain too much remembering that we can memorize. To this general observation, you can also add that the times are always changing with new situations which we have to adjust ourselves, let’s say, along with their positive-negative (and neutral) sides. People around us are aging, new people appears for the good of our future, material things surrounding us are muting to various and different aspects, human technologies are transforming to new interfaces, etc.
I don't think that simply orienting our mind to the reassuring past should be the remedy to insecurity about the apparent uncertain future. Furthermore, this retro-thinking prevents us to better welcome changes that are obviously are not possible to avoid.
In this past year (almost!), the sanitary Covid-19 crisis has been the highlight of our day-today life by imposing us new ways of doing very basic things such as going to your store, eating at resto, receiving friends, be able to enjoy a movie or a show, and many more activities that have been stopped or modified or simply push away into our to do-calendar.
In my family, we were forced to increase our attention for a special care of our aging relatives which was and still is a very complicated matter that has not been fully addressed until this day. Other relatives and friends were difficult to reach at first but by using Web technologies most of the channels have been partly or completely restored.
What we (my wife and I) have discovered in this year 2020 is the importance of concentering ourselves to the essential of life. Simplicity has become our motto for many things. For example, we have sold our propriety to go renting a small apartment in next June 2021. It will give us a better freedom of decision and allow us an easier mobility. Aside that we have renewed our interest to spend more summertime on the countryside as we had begun to do it seven years ago.
In the photographic field, the year 2020 has signify to me the stop of the frenetic material itineration in term of photo equipment which was a very good thing for my shrinking wallet! Many performing digital devices have now enough mature to consider their use on a much longer time period. The photo equipment market is facing an obvious plateau (at least if not a decrease) and the manufacturers (and vendors) have rightly adjusted their production in that perspective. But I must add regarding this good resolution that it will not totally end my envy to try new products time to time (which I have always done since the beginning of my interest in photography).
Lately we have seen the disappearance of some major photo equipment (in situ) events such as the emblematic Photokina in Cologne, Germany. Even before the Covid-19 crisis, most of these events were jeopardized in their future potentiality. More locally I have experimented the same tendency. In some ways I was sad to lose those opportunity to encounter in person and share interest between the members of the photo community. Big and small gatherings should be reinvented instead of being simply virtually transformed. As I may already state, the screen projection should not be the final stage of photography in traditional and fundamental term. For future and longer preservation, photograph should be printed.
To conclude on a personal note, I can restate that my interest in photography has not been too much altered by the last few years changes but the vision of it may have reached a different definition. But the purpose stays the same: "A trace of light that survive a little further than the actual moment of flash!"
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