Its that time of year when its customary to look back - and forwards - so here goes.
I've made a few images of which I'm quite proud this year, perhaps five or six. Some of them are included in the montage above.
I took a different approach to my flower photography, eschewing the shallow depth of field and 'environmental' backgrounds (i.e. whatever happened to be in-shot) of previous years, opting for plain white, or occasionally black. I even put my pretensions aside and produced some colour images. In the process, I think that I've moved things forwards.
On the other hand, my landscape photography almost ceased to produce anything usable, with a late revival just before Christmas at Shapwick.
I also tried, without much success, to document events in Liverpool, as we cleared my father's house of his belongings.
Regarding this blog, I wrote one or two posts that I'm pleased with - the one about SAW, the series about Sony's strategy spring to mind - and a whole lot of pointless verbiage besides.
So, what about next year - 2014, that is?
Well, for one thing, I'm going to stop writing text to post with my images just because I feel I have to - if I have an image to post and nothing to write, then I won't write anything, aside from a short description of the image itself.
I'll try to do some more landscape photography, and get my light tent out more often.
But what about the flower photography? Have I taken that as far as I can? It actually forms the majority of what I do at the moment. My instinct is that I haven't, there's more mileage in it next year, but I really don't know what form that will take. I guess that I've a couple of months to figure that one out.
PS: Coming soon - the Williams Music Awards 2013.
Those of you who've been paying attention may remember that I do a bit of landscape photography as well all the macro work. You may also recall that I was having some trouble making decent images with my Alpha 550, which I designated for landscape work about eighteen months ago. To be honest, I haven't made any landscape images worth posting in a long while.
Anyway, Christmas Eve afternoon found me at Shapwick Heath nature reserve for a walk with my son, who was generally over-excited and needed to burn off some energy. On the upside, sunset was approaching and the quality of the light was very good although there was a stiff breeze. On the downside, I had a wound-up six year old with me, and I needed to keep my wits about me in case he wandered into one of the many pools. Overall, not a good set of circumstances for photography, then.
However, I determined to make the best of it. We spent the first twenty minutes or so looking at the Sweet Track - or rather, the water filled ditch in which it lies. This is another of those access issues, but I'm not entirely sure what the rights and wrongs are, so I won't digress here.
Following this, we walked a bit further into the reserve, with me taking shots as the opportunity arose, until my companion got fed up and we retraced our steps. This image was made on that return trip. What drew me to it was the symmetrical shape of the copse and the setting sun catching the reeds in the foreground.
I didn't have my tripod with me and I wouldn't have had time to set it up in any case. The image was shot handheld with a relatively wide aperture - 1/160s @ f/9.0, if you're interested - with my Tamron lens zoomed slightly to 85mm.
I'm not entirely sure about the composition. I experimented with cropping out the trees on the extreme right of the frame, but in the end decided to present it as shot. Whatever, I think this is an atmospheric image and an improvement on previous images that I've posted of this location. I've a couple more acceptable shots to post from this set, which I'll get round to in the next week or so.
Last weekend we were back in Liverpool for the pre-Christmas visit. On the Sunday evening, as we left the city to return home, our car was written off in an accident, which left us all uninjured, but I've been busy sorting the fallout, hence the hiatus in posts.
Anyway, this really is the last image of a rose that I'm going to post this year.
This particular bloom is the last on a patio rose that we rescued from my father's house. It was given to him as a birthday present a couple of years ago, ostensibly from our son, so he looked after it rather more assiduously than most of the plants in his garden.
A couple of months ago we hired a transit van to clear the last of the stuff from the house and we manhandled this bush, in its pot, into the back and brought it back to Somerset. Its now round the front of the house, standing next to my father's workbench, for which we've no space indoors.
For the record, the title of this post is taken from a Ryan Adams track which appears on his "Easy, Tiger" album.
Despite that fact that we're into December and the winter frosts have started, many of the plants in the garden are still flowering. This osteospermum is in a trough on the north side of the house, so I hadn't noticed that it was hanging on in there until last weekend. Its a bit bedraggled, but I like the asymmetry that introduces.
I just couldn't justify desaturating this image - I really like the intense the blue of the centre and the green of the background.
