As 2020 comes to a close, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the year that was. Things started out normal enough for me. I was only a couple of months into the highest-profile photography show to date when things got weird. 

Photography

In January 2020, I opened my Landscapes of the Body photography project as a solo exhibition at the Lighthouse for the Blind Gallery in downtown San Francisco. My wife, Fauna my Guide Dog, and I flew from Denver to San Francisco for the opening of the exhibition, and I had no idea that was the last place I would travel to this year. The Lighthouse graciously decided to extend the showing through the end of 2020, and I could not be happier with the reception of the pieces, and I am thankful to the Lighthouse for their willingness to show work that was not traditional landscapes or other “safe” content in their gallery. I cannot express how happy I am to have been able to share my vision of the human form with so many people this year. 

Something to talk about

Once the pandemic hit and things started to close down, Travel blogging became incredibly difficult. After I had run through the stockpile of saved blog topics, written all of the pending articles, and showed all the backlogged photos here, topics became tough to find. In the early COVID days, I wanted to make sure to keep a positive spin on my posts because I saw many bloggers falling into the “woe is me” vein. Some made updates on the COVID virus their new direction, but my thinking was that you were already getting information about that from every angle and there was no reason for me to muddy the waters. Now, I did write a few articles about social distancing as a visually impaired person, and COVID and guide dogs, but for the most part, I kept out of the virus reporting game.

I did find myself talking a lot more about technology here on Blind Travels, especially technology that relates to travel. I do believe I will keep that up as we move forward since I have enjoyed researching and writing those stories, and based on the feedback you all seem to like them as well.

Public Speaking

In April, I was a guest speaker on Travel Talk for The Hadley School for the Blind, and it was a wonderful experience. It seemed as though people weren’t able to travel, but were rabid to talk about it. As the year progressed, I was the guest speaker for quite a few organizations and strangely enough, the topic was always on train travel, including quite a few radio shows. By the way, I do love to speak about traveling visually impaired and I never charge for my time. Traveling is a passion and if you would like me to talk to your group about train or any other travel, please feel free to drop me a note on my contact form here on Blind Travels. Coming up next year I will be speaking on travel photography and visual impairment. I’ll post the details here as we get closer to those events.

Technology

With the Pandemic, it was tough to be together in person, and I was happy to see that (mostly) accessible technology was able to stand up to the task. Zoom is of course the go-to way of meeting now, even though Google Groups did try to make a go of it. The Zoom platform is generally useful, and I have found it to be user friendly.

Moving forward

In the coming year, I plan to take some time to write articles about travel photography, since this seems to be a topic many are interested in. With the vaccine starting to roll out, we will all be traveling before you know it. Now is a great time to learn a new skill that will benefit you when we can all start heading out on new adventures. Photography is a great skill to learn, and with the new camera advances from Apple, it is an exciting time to be interested in photography and be visually impaired. More on that in the new year…

If you have topics you would like me to cover this coming year, please feel free to drop m a message on the contact form here. I love to hear from my readers and if you take the time to let me know which articles you find interesting it helps me to stay on track and creating content you love.

2020 may have been a terrible year compared to others, but things will get back to normal. I hope you all have a happy and safe new year celebration and I look forward to interacting with you in the year to come.

My Photography site: http://www.tahquechi.com/

My travel site: http://www.blindtravels.com/

Twitter and Instagram: @nedskee

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