Since the last post, we've clocked the ten thousandth visitor to this site. While it's just a number, it is quite a milestone so I'd like to say thank you to everyone who has visited the page, whether I know you personally or not.

To mark this moment, I'm going to (sort of) break one of my own rules. On the front page of this blog I wrote that "I only try to include my best shots". Well, this post (sort of) breaks that rule. The idea of this post is to show pictures I took when I was just getting into photography and contrast them with similar pictures taken more recently - a sort of "then and now" comparison. While the "then" pictures were the best I was capable of at the time, in retrospect (and, as I hope I will show here) they are a glowing testament to the accuracy of the quote attributed to Henri Cartier-Bresson: "your first ten thousand photos are your worst". Having recently deleted a ton of duplicated photos from Lightroom, I think he had a point.

So here we go. It should (I hope!) be pretty obvious which photos represent the "then" and which the "now".  The "then" photos are smaller because I saved them from Flickr where they had already been downsized.

It's quite instructive to look back at your old photos and see how or if you've improved in the intervening time. I think my main improvements have been in post processing - at the start, I didn't know the second thing about it - and composition (simplifying the picture). Another few years from now, I'll be pretty content if I can make a similar improvement.

"Normal service" will be resumed in the next post, but for now thank you for contributing to this site reaching ten thousand, and here's to the next ten thousand!

Thanks for looking!