It's dangerous to say 'Finished' till the Send button has been well and truly pressed, but I do believe my half of the work on Outdoor Photography (new edition) for Cicerone Press is now complete. The text is complete and correctly formatted, all the captions have been inserted at the right spots and all the picture files numbered accordingly.I’m just waiting to see if there are any last minute corrections from my co-author Chiz Dakin, and then we can say it’s a wrap.

Obviously it will be some time before you can actually read the book, either in print or as an e-book; it now has to be edited and designed and believe me, those are not trivial pursuits. Watch this space for updates.

I started out with the idea that it would be possible to hang everything on the framework of the original Outdoor Photography and just add in new bits here and there to allow for the fact that digital was in its infancy when the first book appeared. Of course it’s not been like that at all. Although core ideas about what photography is have not changed that much, the technology does have a pretty fundamental effect on the way we approach it. And the outdoors has changed too. I don’t believe I’d even heard of kite-surfing last time, let alone photographed it.

So the new book will be bigger and better, with not only a lot of content specific to digital photography but a lot more solid stuff related to specific sports and activities too.
Thanks to Jonathan Williams at Cicerone for an excellent editorial steer in the early stages and of course to Chiz for lots of hard work, good ideas and great photos.

And now it’s time for a pint.

PS I’ve just agreed to run a couple of workshops on Introduction to Digital Outdoor Photography at the Keswick Mountain Festival, under the auspices of NASOP, The National Academy for Sport & Outdoor Photography. Dates probably 18th and 20th of May. Again, more details will follow.