why

ALL IMAGES ON THIS SITE WERE TAKEN ON AN iPHONE

in like lion out like a lamb

why now?

Why not January 1st to start?
Surely that's neater and that’s the beginning of the year. 
Well here’s what I’m thinking. January is full of challenges and resolutions and pressure to start things. It's overcrowded with new beginnings. 
Why can’t a new beginning be whenever you want it to be? Turns out that March is really the true start of the year. What? Well if you go back to when we lived off the land, in sync and flow with nature, it is.
In the pagan tradition, around March 20th is the Spring equinox. One of only two days in the year where day and night are the same length. 

March is the real time of new beginnings.
New life. When the lambs are born and the flowers finally make their way through the cold crusty, land gasping for light. Finally they made it. That says let’s start something to me. That resonates more than any January sale.
The whole of Spring has always symbolised renewal and regrowth, hope and possibility.


A dull, grey January. Broke, partied out and cold. Seeing all the stuff you just bought a few weeks ago for a pretty penny chucked in a bargain bin by the till. Just because it's January. 
Our ancestors believed in balance in life and weather and would be hopeful that if March weather started out stormy it would mean that it would end calmly.

It is of course also lambing season and if you’re Christian it's Easter. Which I think we all know is less about chocolate eggs and more to do with the resurrection of Jesus.
He certainly had a well deserved new beginning there. 

In astrology the constellations of Leo the lion and Aries the ram (or lamb) have Leo rising at the beginning of March in the east and Aries setting at the end of March in the west.
Farming, astrology, weather, nature, religion. So there you have it, whichever way you look, March is the beginning of the year and I’m sticking to it. 
New beginning and possibility. 
Now that’s a reason to start something.

why

at all?

There is somewhat of a profound importance weaved in amongst the seemingly mundane and ordinary of daily life. There is a term for those things, they are the ‘infra-ordinary’. That just sounds more special.

I love family photos. I mean I’m that person who will happily look at people’s sunset pictures and holiday slideshows. Dusty family albums three generations back.
I don’t mean those family photos taken in white studios. Or the ones wearing matching tan outfits twirling in lavender fields. Sorry if you have any of those. But I mean real daily life. 

I have been immersed in the world of phone photography for the last ten years and during that time I’ve been documenting my kids' lives. I always thought that this was an aside from the photography that I really wanted to do. That was until I realised it was, well, everything I only wanted to do. It was right there all the time.

I had these ten years been contemplating writing something that I couldn’t find anywhere.
A manual for real people and real lives and using a camera everyone could afford and have access to. 

Well the iPhone came along and took care of the camera part. And I had a ‘recipe’ I always used. A recipe I felt was a fool proof way to tell a story in pictures. 

Over time I used this recipe to tell my stories and developed a bunch of hacks and techniques that worked for me. I put all these ideas, these ingredients, in a pot and set them on a steady simmer on the back-burner of my mind. Let that simmer for say, well, ten years. 
Then one day, as I came out of the fog of being a mum to little kids, I peered tentatively inside that pot. Expecting of course to find some charred remains. 

Instead, I thought, you know what ‘I could make some thing out of that’. And here it is…well here it will be in 52 weeks time. As we go about this unfolding year my plan is to create 52 pieces of content that I will send to you. I will put together everything I know about telling stories of everyday life using your phone. Every little thing. Put together they will make up the book I was once looking for.