I’ll admit: when I daydreamed about the days when I would be running Wildflower Illustration Co. full-time, I envisaged whole uninterrupted evenings of writing – a blog post a week, plenty of time to faff, style photographs and sketch aimlessly. Time will flow freely I thought- after all, I will have an extra nine or ten hours per weekday which will be solely my own.
Somehow, that daydream hasn’t quite materialised into existence yet, and something tells me it probably won’t, ever. I still always seem to be running late – and quite frankly my mind boggles about how I managed to do anything at all in my evenings and weekends in that previous life of full-time employment. I’m still figuring out how to manage my time in a totally different world.
So, as it happens, since leaving my job in August, I have made it to mid-November with a grand total of zero completed blog posts, thousands of unedited photographs from the honeymoon, and a brain full of things I want to share about the wedding. This has led me to think I might need a new approach, so I’m going to have a go at that old ‘little and often’ strategy.
To start it off, I wanted to share a handful of photographs from a series I began on honeymoon whilst we were driving the North Coast 500 Route around the very tip of Northern Scotland. Surrounded by beautiful scenery, but with biting winds and an occasionally restless puppy, I soon realised that I was going to drive us all mad if I insisted that we stop every time we turned a corner into more delicious scenery.
There is also something mildly unsatisfying about having a set of photographs which look as though they should have been taken miles into a gratifying hike, which were actually taken whilst you stand on the roadside, cars whizzing by and your laces undone because you’ve only slipped your toes into your shoes seconds before.
I therefore began, tentatively, to take photographs through the windscreen – embracing the spots on the glass and the wipers and the dashboard. Looking back on them now, I realise that they are a much more authentic record of the trip for me. Two weeks later, having driven through much of the Highlands, Skye, and Loch Lomond, I really like how the series together demonstrate the contrasts in landscape across Scotland – and, of course, the ever-changing weather.
I hope you enjoy them too. Have you ever created a photo-set which you were proud of because they captured something in a different way? I’d love to see, if you share in the comments below. 
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