Best of 2012

I’ve been editing my photos from 2012 all week. I’ve been trying to distill the entire year into just twelve images. The first part of the process was to wade through the thousands of photographs I created this past year and cull the best into a folder that eventually contained about 140 images. From there it was easy to pare the selection down to my top 30 images. The selection of just 12 images was more challenging. Maybe half of my final selection got picked again and again, but the other half could have just as easily been replaced by other images from my top 30. Of course, I see these photos in a way that no one else can, I have emotional attachments to the places and moments in which these images were created. Although I try to be as objective as possible, your choices may be quite different from mine.
 I shot more photographs last year than in any other year of my life. While at the same time I made a conscious decision to stay close to home. I only traveled more than fifteen miles from home for photography a handful of times, less than any year before. I can practically count on one hand the number of photo excursions I had beyond that fifteen mile radius.
And now I’m asking myself, was it worth it? Did I accomplish what I had hoped to, by staying close to home and photographing more frequently? Did the volume of work lead to more individual stellar images? Or, did the lack of exceptional landscape locations lead to a less inspiring collection of photographs?
I knew at the outset that I would be forced into looking more closely at details; that intimate landscapes and close-ups would be my bread and butter rather than grand landscapes. And yet at the end of the year my top images were filled with picks from the few ventures I made to more dramatic locations. Why were images from one week spent shooting in California, disproportionately represented in my top 30? Was it the novelty of these images to me, their relative newness, or is it just the fact that all places are not created equally, that regardless of season or time of day, the Earth makes more magnificent gestures in some places?
Undoubtedly the best thing to come from this experiment was that my photography went in new and unexpected directions as my affection for birds and my interest in photographing them blossomed. I began to see birds as ready subjects, and I began to take a different approach to address a completely new set of photographic challenges. One of the main things this did for me was to open up the middle of the day, light I had previously shunned, I found useful. Indeed, most of my shooting this past year took place outside of the golden hours of sunrise and sunset. In fact, it’s almost impossible to capture anything but the silhouette of a bird at the edge of the day.
With most of my time spent photographing birds coming in the second half of the year, I was encouraged to have created quality portraits of at least fifteen different species by year’s end. And when I compare my best bird photographs with my best landscapes, some of them hold up pretty well. Five bird images ended up making my top 30. Bird photography, or attempted bird photography, did however account for the thousands of worthless images ending up on my CF cards and hard drives, which is why it took me a week to edit.
Editing all of your images from the year to the best dozen is an incredibly useful exercise. And when you compare these images with your best from past years you can really see the trends and changes in your style. When I see all of my best images from the year in one place, I’m both proud of what I’ve accomplished and humbled by the possibilities for improvement.

Happy New Year

At this time of year it’s hard not to think about what’s been accomplished over the last twelve months as well as what needs work. While I can’t pat myself on the back to enthusiastically, my original resolution was to post an image accompanied by at least one paragraph, five days a week, Monday thru Friday. I did make progress as a nature photography blogger though.  I fell way short of my original goal, but I didn’t give up entirely and fall back into my one post per month routine of previous years.
This is my sixty-eighth post of 2012, which is a vast improvement over last year’s dozen posts. I think my original goal was too lofty, but I would like to improve on my blogging frequency and consistency. Two posts per week might even be a stretch, but it’s doable. The hard part is publishing blog posts with any consistency, meaning on the same day(s), week after week. My blogging over the past year has come in fits and starts (I think that’s a phrase). I’ve tried to maintain a minimum of one post per week, and sometimes I even fell short of that, but going in to the New Year, I have a renewed commitment to continue improving my blog. To anyone who has read any of what I’ve written over the past year, thank you. Hopefully some of it has been useful.  And hopefully my writing is improving. HAPPY NEW YEAR!