A photographic overview of 2011

Well, another year gone by with the camera more or less grown on to my hand. However, even though I took more than enough photographs during the year, somehow I’m left with the feeling that I should have done more. Note, this will be an exceptionally photo heavy post.

Despite the feeling of not quite getting where I wanted during the year, I did make several photographs I’m proud of and they are scattered here among some more or less useless statistics of the year ;). The images are shown in a chronological order, so don’t expect any logical order in the groupings.

So after doing some final cleanup of my Lightroom library, the end result is that I shot

• 18400 pictures (give or take a few)
• 200 taken with our old Canon 30D, the rest with our Canon 7D
• 2500 tagged with metadata, the rest are untagged at the moment.

Now I should note that these statistics only cover my DSLR photographs, iPhone shots aren’t in my Lightroom catalog, but I’ll get to iPhoneography later on in the post.

I’ve known that my lens selections tend to vary mostly between the 17-55 and 70-200. Thus the following statistic on lens usage isn’t at all surprising. In fact, I was more surprised on how much I’d used the two Sigma primes. The 70-200 IS is a friends lens that was quickly tested for a few shots.

• Tokina 11—16 362 pictures
• Sigma 50/1.4 910 pictures
• Sigma 150/2.8 1029 pictures
• Canon 50/1.8II 175 pictures
• Canon EF-S 17—55/2.8 8241 pictures
• Canon EF70—200/4L 7670 pictures
• Canon EF70—200/4L IS 38 pictures

Based on this years experience of using IS more than before (I bought our first IS lens late last year), I must say that I’m reconsidering it’s use. Sure, dogs rarely stay still enough for the IS to be of any use, but a 70-200/2.8 IS has found it’s way on to my wishlist. Not that I’ll be getting it anytime soon…

Of course, right after listing all of these statistics, we went a dug out the camera for some more pictures. We took 87 more pictures, all of them with the 17—55. Look at the last picture of the post to see what we came up with.

I started the year with a strong intention to finally complete a 365 and managed to keep going for some time. Sure, I missed a day or two here and there, but lost my enthusiasm for it – and many other things – when we suddenly lost Jalo. However, you view the set of pictures that I managed to make in my Flickr set.

Even more than the loss of Jalo, the whole year was marked by too much procrastination. During 2010 I decided to work on the business side of my photography. Honestly – other than watching some Creative Live sessions and thinking about the business side a lot – I haven’t done a thing. For the coming year I have some more thoughts and a preliminary todo list with some scheduling thrown in. I finally realized that I must make some kind of timetable for myself if I’m to achieve anything.

One of my goals for the year was to put more effort into learning the video side of everything. Alas, despite shooting a few different sets of footage, I never got around to editing any of it. The only video that I edited all the way was the test of how shutter speeds effect the image in video.

As I noted, our Lightroom catalog doesn’t have any iPhone pictures in it, but it doesn’t mean that our iPhones have been silent. They really are a good replacement for a point and shoot – even my old 3G which Anna uses (more on this in an upcoming post). As a part of my 365 I decided that I will make photographs with my phone and it has been a good experience. Since the beginning of the year I’ve been posting iPhone shots on Flickr (mostly in the 365 set), Facebook (friends only), and Instagram. But some shots have appeared in other social sites as well – I probably don’t even remember then all.

I think in summary I could say that for me, photographically, 2011 was a year of some great photographs that were made intentionally more than just snapped. Most of this has come from the process of thinking of the vision I have for the photographs – something I took home from David duChemin’s Creative Live session in 2010.

2012 will bring a more structured and thought out learning process to further my skills and more disciplined shooting to get me where I want to go and further some of the projects I have in my head…

Honestly though, I probably have many good photographs I’ve missed – mostly because of my laziness and lag in editing and tagging photographs. I’ve also got photographs from two trips that are largely unprocessed which will be appearing later on.