On the way home from a trip to the Cavan Burren early this morning I stopped by Lough Oughter and came across this scene. The plucky little plant growing against the rock, fragile but determined to make it despite the odds, resonated with me.

Increasingly over the past twelve years photography has played an important part in my life. For me, the curiosity and attraction is the creative process. The ability to create and interpret what you see into something that can communicate to others. I gain incredible satisfaction from it. We are all born innately creative. I see my own young children express their creativity daily and often question what happens as we grow into adults and seemingly suppress it. Is it society? Is it a hangover from the industrial age where productivity and process triumphed? I think back to my own time as a kid and remember fondly the creative things I did as a normal part of growing up. I want to experience that freedom of creativity again and share it with others.

Since I started my career in 1993 I have carved a path in the corporate world with a couple of excursions into smaller/startup enterprises. Those experiences have shaped me and delivered the most incredible highs and very difficult lows. I have experienced success and experienced failure, both essential in helping me understand who I am and where I am going.

Over the past twelve months my desire to take up the utmost creative challenge, combining my passion in photography with my experience in business, has led me to launch into a new venture in photography education. I am now full-time dedicated to this new venture which I am certain will bring its own set of unique experiences.

So back to that little green plant. I see it as me and the new venture, plucky to get a start but still fragile, the first couple of steps are clear but beyond that is uncertainty. Only tenacity, resilience and determination will see it develop into the tree that it has the potential to become. The less risky option is to stay on shore under the shelter of mature trees. Or is it? Those mature trees may provide initial shelter but might ultimately starve it of its true potential. Steven Pressfield puts it succinctly in his book “The War of Art” with “Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.”

I will post here on the blog regularly with updates, developments and general musing. Lots to come. You can sign-up to the Newsletter here for periodic updates and follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.