Hi folks,

It's been a while, I know. I had a small disaster at the end of last year as some of you may know, my computer crashed, my hard drive was corrupted and I lost my Lightroom catalogue! Although my RAW files were safe and sound on an external drive, I lost all the work, edits and processing I'd done for the last 3 years. I was devastated. I cried, then set about turning it into a silver lining. To start from scratch, to organise all my images, to go through them as I added them to my library and delete all the ‘rubbish’, to keyword every single image so I can actually find what I’m looking for and to rate them so I can easily pick out the good stuff from the bad.

I struggle to delete all my photos, tending to keep a fair amount of them as memories rather than proper photos but I’ve managed to half the amount of images I had to begin with. It took me 8 months, and a slightly nocturnal lifestyle (apparently I work best from 12 midnight to 6am) but finally it was complete. Everything is in it’s place and I’m more organised and up to date than I have EVER been. It was worth it.

I don’t recommend it but the silver lining turned out really well.

From that I decided my website needed an update too, not an overhaul but all my up to date images are now online and ready for viewing (and purchasing if you wish).

I've updated folders already there (ie. South Africa, Black and White) and added new folders (ie. Azores, Botswana) so please feel free to have a browse and tell me what you think.

I've also updated my 'Personal Favourites' page and thought I would share with you why a few of them are my favourites.

This is a favourite of mine, even though others don't love it. I really like the panorama feel, the beautiful light and the eyes. I spent a lot of time with this deer and her family, she was pretty tolerant of me, I would be out in the open and approach carefully and she would keep an eye on me, know where I was but allowed me to stay if I stayed quiet and calm.

She's beautiful..

This one I titled 'Photobomb' and it always makes me chuckle when I look at it and something that makes you happy is a good thing to have as a favourite.

This one I call 'Tears of a Swan', it was only in processing I noticed the tear falling from it's eye, and these days it's bittersweet for me too, as this was the last year I followed my family of swans.

Anyway, I hope to keep everything more up to date now that I am not spending every moment remaking my image library and really want to keep myself organised.

Remember to always look on the bright side, sometimes you can't see it straight away but everything happens for a reason!

Take care of yourselves

~ Nikki