Lens-Artists,  London,  Philippines,  Svalbard,  Travel in general

Gallery: last chance to see (more glimpses of 2025)

December 14, 2025 / 58 Comments

The highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive

Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run

‘Born to Run’ is a quintessential Springsteen song about a yearning for escape, romance, and rebellion against a suffocating reality. Young people seizing what they believe is a last chance to make something different of their lives, looking for something better than they feel they have at home. And whether they find it or not, isn’t it part of human nature to grasp anything we perceive as a last chance?

You could say that all of life is a series of last chances

Cynthia Voigt, Homecoming

This week the Lens Artists team offer us a last chance, namely the opportunity to share some photos taken this year but not (yet) used in any LAC posts. Of course, being stubborn, I decided to try to find some not used in any previous posts to date. While I did my best to check that, it’s possible one or two have been duplicated, but hopefully not.

I’ve grouped them according to location. The first set were taken close to home in Ealing or in central London. The remaining sets are from this year’s two major trips, to the Philippines and to Svalbard.

My feature photo was taken at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and is part of an installation titled ‘Speculations on Capture’ by Morehshin Allahyari.

And as always with these galleries, click on any photo to open a captioned slideshow. Also, if reading on a phone you may need to open the captions by clicking on the ‘i’ in a circle below the image (see right).

Close to home

This is a somewhat random collection of images from my monthly photo archives that didn’t make it into my regular Changing Seasons post, mainly simply for reasons of room.

The Philippines

The photo below of the sunset in El Nido was included in my Philippines in black and white post but hasn’t been shared in this colour version.

The Arctic

This week’s Last Chance theme has given me a great excuse to share a few more photos of the amazing polar bear encounter we experienced in Svalbard. I took so many that I had to leave a lot on the cutting room floor!

I’ve also included a few landscapes that didn’t make my Arctic diary posts, and some of details that caught my eye but again didn’t make it into any posts about the trip.

I visited the Philippines in February 2025 and Svalbard in August 2025

58 Comments

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