I haven't done one of these for some time but I saw Jim Goldstein's tweet referring to his annual
blog project to collect photographers' "Best of year" links, so I thought I'd have a look and see what I'd done during the year that was 2015.
The first thing I looked at was my Lightroom catalogue to find that there were a shade under 1,800 shots with metadata showing the year of 2015. Keep in mind that I delete any totally unusable (accidental release, hugely under/over-exposed, totally out of focus) or unwanted (sky or ground shots used to mark the end of a sequence, kids' or drunks' "take my photo, take my photo, take my photo") shots. The ~1,800 shots remaining represent, in the 'old money' that I still sometimes think in, an average of one roll of film per week. I need to make an effort to up this rate next year.
A surprising split this year was that I took slightly more shots with my Nikon D5000 than with my D90 (908 to 857). I think this is because I picked up a Lowenpro Passport Sling bag on special from
Cameras Direct and it was an easier fit with the D5000 than with the D90. My D90 always has the battery pack/grip on it, mostly because I've lost the original battery compartment cover!
Another interesting statistic that I noticed from my Lightroom catalogue data was my use of lenses this year.
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| I love that 60mm lens! |
Moving from Lightroom to my main on-line presence, Flickr, I find that I have posted a mere 172 photos this year. This really needs to be picked up. Still, I suppose it's better than my poor
500px account which was given a miserly 15 shots for the whole year (and five of them were from a series shot on the same day).
And so to my actual favourite shots of the year. I narrowed them down to ten, in which there is one insect macro, two abstracts, three flower macros, two landscapes, one street shot and one Photoshop composite. There are a total of seven people in these ten shots, but six are in one photo and they only take up about one eighth of the area of the image.
Let me put them in order for you, from January 1 to December 3.
New Year's Day. Looking out the privacy glazed window of my bathroom I was taken by the resemblance to
Andreas Gursky's Rhine II. I may have been hung over, but hey, if you want to pay 4.3 million dollars I'll print you this photo and destroy the negative.
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| Green |
At the end of the month of January, in preparation to whisking up a vinaigrette for a salad dressing, I poured some olive oil, red wine, lemon juice and balsamic vinegar into a white bowl. Dinner was delayed for some time while I set up some lighting and shot this.
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| Sol |
One Friday in late February, having missed my intended train from Footscray station I had some time to kill. I took to riding the escalators and exploring what I could see of the different eras of architecture that was available. I noticed this young lady watching me and pointed my camera away from her to ease any tension she may have felt. I still took this shot though.
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| Reflections |
The following Saturday I took a little photowalk around my neighbourhood. This was during a professionally stressful period while I was developing a database to collect and manage information to allow the Education Department to allocate millions of dollars in funding. I needed some peaceful imagery. I managed to get two favourites on the same day.
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| bluepink |
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| Purple Trumpets |
As autumn approached, in March my favourite (ok, my only) niece got married in a beautiful location in country Victoria. I wasn't the wedding photographer (the name's Billy, not Silly!) but of course I took a camera.
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| Alix's Wedding |
I dislike square landscape shots but in May, after a walk along the Lerderderg River near my place I had a bunch of exposure bracketed shots and well, seeing as Lightroom was now offering baked-in HDR and Photoshop had baked-in panorama stitching, how could I not experiment? Some of it was awful, some awesome!
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| Double river view |
There are places in the world where winter is bleak and miserable. In Victoria, Australia, we mostly just get different pretty flowers to shoot. Wattles, acacias, and literally five minutes walk down the road from me, this gorgeous thing.
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| Pincushion Hakea |
Throughout this year I have been applying myself to learning to do more in post-processing using Photoshop. I really like where I got to with this moth macro overlaid with some grungy textures.
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| Moth (textured) |
This brings me up to just last week! A composite shot of 19 (it was 20, but salt crystals are hard to shoot!) individual shots of various herbs, spices and other condiments from my pantry. This is the first image in probably 30 years that I deliberately made with the plan of printing it in a large format.
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| Spices |
Well thanks for taking the time to look at my pictures and read my nonsense! I'd love to hear from you in the comments below, if you could spare a moment or two.
The next year should be very interesting, photographically. I have now officially retired from work, so I have much more time to spend on artistic endeavours. I have also bought myself a present of a large (-ish) format printer and will be expending more effort into print making and presentation. There's fun to be had!
Good light, my friends, good light.
