I'm back. And genuinely glad to be here, even if the blank page and I have had something of a standoff for the past seven months.
The truth, if I'm being honest is that the intervening months have passed with surprising speed, largely because I filled them with the very thing this blog exists to celebrate: travelling, photographing, and, when the occasion demanded it, using both as an entirely convenient excuse to avoid sitting down and writing. When I think of it, essentially a working definition of writer's block, dressed up as "productivity".
My camera has not stopped though, even although the keyboard, rather conspicuously, did.
So I'm going to change that...

Colin Prior (Far Right) and two friends watching a majestic sunset on the Isle of Muck, Inner Hebrides, Scotland

You ask … what happened to cause the break?
The easy answer is: Berlin, Christmas and a Kenyan safari — with the new adventure into wildlife photography taking me by storm, partly in my getting to grips with new kit but mainly by being fascinated with a new discipline that was so unfamiliar yet strangely déjà-vu familiar.

Brandenburg Gate, Berlin

As a result, I simply found that new life experiences, in a wonderfully chaotic way, filled the space that writing had previously occupied. The blog became the thing that "I'll definitely get round to tomorrow", and tomorrow quietly became spring and then more…
But the camera never went away. For the first time I shot more than a terabyte of images on a single holiday, so you can perhaps appreciate that, if anything, the past seven months have seen my lenses pointed at more extraordinary places and in more extraordinary circumstances than at any point since I started this adventure. The editing folder on my hard drive is, frankly, alarmingly but excitingly large.
And I have a lot to tell you. Not least to explain the "yet strangely déjà-vu familiar" thing... (That’s for the next post.)

Let me start with the thing that has genuinely changed how I think about photography.

Going on Safari
In the early part of this year, I did something I had honestly never seriously considered before: I went on safari in Kenya.

Now, I am — as you know — a landscape and cityscape photographer. I have always been more interested in what a landscape or a city looks like at 5am, than thinking about pointing a camera at wildlife. Until now. At least that was my excuse till now.

Animals move. Landscapes and cities don't (except clouds and the sun). I like to plan my shots, wait for the light, and have some degree of control over proceedings. All previous attempts at photographing animals was limited to dogs, and whilst I was keen at one time to start a pet photography business, I conveniently managed to lose this ambition when landscape photography started to fall into place for me and I assumed that landscapes - and cityscapes to a degree - were my thing….
But here is what I was completely wrong about: I assumed wildlife photography would feel like someone else's discipline. A separate language I hadn't studied. Instead, the moment an elephant appeared in my viewfinder just a few minutes after landing in Amboseli —  and I mean, really appeared, not in the way you see them in a wildlife documentary but there  in the actual world, with Mount Kilimanjaro in the background, no less — every instinct I'd developed as a landscape photographer kicked in at once. Light direction. Composition. Patience. Waiting for the decisive moment - well sort of - continuous pressing of the shutter button soon became recognised as essential to catch “that” moment.

The elephants walked. With no attention to me or our vehicle and so it happened.

I was hooked. elephants, lions, leopards, cheetahs, buffalo, zebras, birds, more birds and did I say birds...! 

A "coalition" of cheetahs - Amboseli, Kenya

Wildlife photography, it turns out, is not another language. It is just the same language spoken at a completely different and rather thrilling pace. Whilst there’s a difference shooting landscapes, I reused skills learned years previously - but that’s for a different post - let’s get restarted first!

Firstly, there’s something else to add here…

Photography and the Quiet Business of Feeling Better

This is something I've been wanting to explore in this blog for a while, and the safari experience brought it into sharp focus (if you'll forgive the pun).

As a doctor, I was well versed in the evidence around mental health: the complexity of it, the importance of it, and the sometimes frustrating limitations of what medicine alone can do for it. What I've discovered through my own photographic journey, and what the safari started to crystallise for me, is that different genres of photography seem to offer genuinely different psychological gifts.

This feels worth discussing properly, so consider this an introduction to a theme that will run through many of the posts ahead.

Suilven, (731m or 2,398 feet) Scottish highlands - don't let the low height fool you!

Landscape photography, I've come to believe, is essentially structured mindfulness. To take a great landscape photograph you must be still, patient, and acutely present. You cannot be ruminating about tomorrow's problems whilst waiting for the light to change over a Hebridean sea loch. The landscape demands your full attention, and in return it gives you something remarkably close to peace. Research increasingly supports what photographers have always intuitively known — time in natural environments measurably reduces cortisol, lowers anxiety, and improves mood. The camera gives you a reason to be there, and the composition process focuses the mind in a way that is almost meditative.

Brrooklyn Bridge, New York, from the Manhattan Bridge in the last warm week of summer

Cityscape photography offers something different — and something I think is under-appreciated. Cities are extraordinary in the way they compress humanity into frame: the architecture of centuries, the light on glass and stone, the lone figure crossing a bridge in the blue hour. Cityscape photography is an exercise in finding order within apparent chaos, and there is a particular satisfaction — I would almost call it a cognitive reward — in imposing your own composition on a scene that seems to resist it. There is also the not inconsiderable joy of wandering; of getting genuinely lost in the bazaars of Istanbul and Marrakech or Budapest at dawn with a camera bag on your shoulder and racing to get set up before the sunrises too far. That kind of purposeful activity is, I think, quietly wonderful for the soul.

Tiger cub, Masai Mara

Wildlife photography, as I've just discovered, is something else entirely. It is presence under pressure. (And as Billie Jean King once said, "pressure is a priviledge!") You cannot plan it the way you plan a sunrise shoot. A cheetah does not wait for the best light. Instead, what this demands of the photographer is a state of alert, focused calm — what sports psychologists might call 'the zone' — where thinking drops away and reaction takes over. I came home from Kenya feeling, oddly, as though I had been reset. As if several months of low-grade mental noise had been switched off for ten days and I'd forgotten to turn it back on again. In retrospect, this was a combination of two previously hard to explain concepts - the first is awe and the second is flow. More about these two to come….

These three experiences — the still patience of landscape, the curious wandering of cityscape, the electric alertness of wildlife — seem to me to address mental wellbeing from three very different angles. With this in mind, I intend to explore each of them properly as we travel through the months ahead.

What’s Coming — An Itinerary Worth Getting Excited About
Here is the rough shape of where this blog is heading over the coming months. Subject to the usual disclaimer that life has a tendency to rearrange the furniture when you’re not looking:

Eiffel Tower from underneath the El-Hakim Bridge, Paris - early summer sunset

Paris — Paris in early summer. Genuinely gorgeous — and, as it turns out, a masterclass in retrospect, in how to present a photography portfolio. 
Kenya — Safari, Amboseli, the Maasai Mara, and the completely unexpected discovery that I am, apparently, a wildlife photographer now. At least some of the time. The “déjà-vu familiar” thing I promised to explain — the Kenyan post is where I explain it…
Iceland — Iceberg lagoons, waterfalls and herring factories, emigration towns (yes — emigration, not immigration) and a hope that I will eventually manage to photograph the Aurora Borealis, given that I’ve now been far north a couple of times. Next time, maybe…
The Arctic Circle & Ice Hotel— Temperatures of minus twenty-something, dog sled rides (as the driver!), dog meditation (yes - I choose my words well), snowmobile driving and the lifesaver manoeuvre (?!?)— not to mention reindeer, pizza and the sweet taste of hot lingonberry juice as a very well-earned reward.
The Hebrides — One of the most underrated and genuinely spectacular places on earth, and conveniently on my doorstep as a Scotsman. The Isles of Muck, Eigg, Rhum, Canna and Colonsay — and that strange feeling that you’re somehow in the Bahamas, yet only a few miles from Glasgow.
Santorini — Sunsets, friendships formed, and the importance of getting to a vantage point early. I may need to be forgiven for a rant about social media here. You have been warned.

Oia, Santorini sunset

Istanbul — A city I first visited fifty years ago — and one that has never stopped pulling me back. Mosques, bazaars, the Bosphorus at golden hour, and some very good coffee and baklava.
Rome — The Eternal City through a photographer’s eye — which means before the crowds arrive, and sometimes despite them. Early mornings, strong espresso, and a moment of revelation at the Trevi Fountain when I realised the crowds aren’t the problem. They’re part of the artwork.
Budapest — A city consistently and bafflingly underestimated — with a history of extraordinary heroism, a language that was quite literally invented to forge a national identity, and a winter light that stops you in your tracks.

Budapest Parliament building, mid-winter

Berlin & Köln — Two cities, one blog trip — Berlin’s extraordinary visual contrasts and layered history, paired with Köln at Christmas. Cathedral, markets, and the kind of winter light that makes a photographer want to never go home.
Arizona & Monument Valley — The American Southwest, which left me genuinely speechless — and provoked something I’ve been thinking about ever since: the neurophysiology of awe. Why does wilderness do what it does to the human brain? I have some thoughts… Speechless by the way not just for the scenery but for a friendship of the best and kindest sort.

Cathedral Rock, Sedona, Arizona

I’ve been thinking, during the quiet months, about what this blog should be. The original premise still stands: not just photography technique, but predominantly the whole travel experience of being somewhere with a camera. The light, yes. The composition, absolutely. But also the food and coffee worth knowing about, and the practical business of actually getting around — hire car, subway, on foot, whatever the city demands. Add to this the odd moment of photographic failure that turned out to be quietly instructive, and the travel logistics that no one tells you about until it’s too late.

Mental health, wellbeing, awe and flow....

What I also want to add, going forward, is a thread that surprised me a little when it started to crystallise in my thoughts — so I share this with you with a degree of awareness that it may seem a bit… unusual. In particular, my medical work in years gone by has given me the experience to look at practical ways of thinking about wellbeing, and I’ve become increasingly convinced that photography and mental health have more to say to each other than perhaps seems immediately obvious. Not in a heavy-handed way — this is not that kind of blog — but it’s woven into the stories, because I think it matters. And because I suspect many people pick up a camera for reasons that pay no attention to f-stops and focal lengths……

Iceberg, Fjallsárlón lagoon, Iceland

Posts will land every fortnight or so — depending, inevitably, on how many times I’ve been distracted by the editing folder. I’ll do my best to be consistent. The camera has taught me patience; I’m working on applying it to publishing schedules but I think my photography skills are better than my publishing abilities. I also intend to resurrect my Instagram account.After all, I've got enouigh photos to keep it active for years without picking up my camera...!

The Strawberries Are Back on the Menu
If you’re new here and wondering what the blog title means — Eating Strawberries ….The famous Zen story "The Tiger and the Strawberry" is a powerful parable about mindfulness which illustrates how to stay present, find joy, and embrace the exact moment you are in, even when life feels chaotic or threatening. Without going into details, my family life has a couple of tigers wandering close by, so this seemed the right name for my blog at the moment.

Tobermory Harbour, Mull, Scotland with an angry summer sky

Seven months of silence notwithstanding, I haven’t stopped eating strawberries. Far from it, they’re a daily staple — but until now I’ve just been too busy chewing to write about them, and even as I type, I’m conscious of my trespassing on jealously guarded space to write this blog.
Thank you — genuinely — for still being here or being a first time reader. Whether you’ve been checking back occasionally or have simply found this post through a search engine’s mysterious and unknowable algorithms, I’m glad you’re reading.
I have witnessed some wonderful places, and I’m proud to share my photographs with you.

The last remnants of sunset over Amboseli, Kenya

Happy travelling, and happy shooting!

Colin