Okay so yesterday I hit a milestone! I am currently sitting nicely on exactly 5000 people circling me on Google+. A number I wouldn’t have even comprehended when I joined this site. I have made many new friends, opened many new doors, had the amazing opportunity to get published in two books, been inspired to push my work to the next level and just had a bloody good time.
I am going to share an image that I found in my Lightroom archive. I think this has some similarities to my time on Google+. It was taken whilst me and a few friends were playing football with some Burmese migrant children about 20 yards away from the Thai-Burmese border. It was pitch black (this was taken at the equivalent of 8000 iso, f2.8, 1/60 sec), pouring down with rain, knee deep in mud in some places, mosquito infested and we were playing with children we had met about 2 minutes before hand. We didn’t speak a common language, we weren’t even of a similar age but we were somehow brought together by a single football and we had a hell of a time.
A common interest that brought us together across the other side of the globe with children who couldn’t possibly live any more different lives. Their families survive on about $1-2 a day feeding up to 6 people. The camera in my hand at the time could have bought them nearly 5 years of living! It was an amazing and humbling experience and one that I will never forget. This image is probably nothing special to anybody on here but it is powerful to me. The personal and subjective nature of photography I suppose.
