From The Distance Project 1. Note how the dog walker takes a wide berth from my subject. There's two metres between the main subject, and the left hand side of the frame. This could have been taken with almost any camera, but I used the K3 and 16-50mm zoom lens.

What to Do?

It’s been over three and a half months since I started The Distance Project, and it's going well. If you want to start on your own photo project, you need just two things: a camera, and a clear idea of what you want to do. Perhaps you want to document a year in the life of your garden, or of your grandparents.

Any camera at all can be used. What sort of camera it is might make a difference to what you can photograph, but the vast majority of pictures in this project could have been taken on almost anything.

So first I’ll talk about the idea.

There are at least half a dozen lost villages just around Milton Keynes, so this is a very useful book. It’s not true that most villages vanished because of the plague, and this book explains what really happened; there are all sorts of reasons.

I do all I can to make sure my posts tell you new things about the places I write about; they aren’t just a rehash of everyone else’s online posts.

So quite a bit of my research is not on the internet.

If you've been plagued by mosquitos in this hot weather, it's because they are breeding somewhere nearby, in stagnant water.

I realised they were breeding in my rainwater gullies, which look like the picture. I poured a bucket of water down each one, which seems to have flushed any larvae away and makes sure that the trap (like a U-bend) has enough water in it to seal.

It works. I haven't been bothered since. I had already checked there was no stagnant water in my garden, and turned a couple of old water butts upside down; mosquitos only need a very tiny amount of stagnant water to breed. You might have a different design, or there's some other sort of gully arrangement, perhaps on a hardstanding for water runoff. Another bucket of water down each one after a week might be a good idea, too.