Monday 31 December 2007

End of year review 2007

Bambrugh castle, Northumberland - my image of the year

It has been a very creative year for me and it seems fitting that the last blog post of 2007 should have a look back at the year.....and what a full and creative year it has been.

This has been the first full year with a digital SLR and its introduction has certainly made a large impact in 2007. Quite simply it has revolutionised my photography and combined with film cameras, digital will continue to be an important part of my photographic kit. Although it's been the first full year with digital, i have continued to use film. I just love both. As i went through the negatives and digital images i realised that I had loads of images to choose from for the favourite image of the year. It was a close thing but....phew..... i finally came up with a winner.

My favourite image of 2007 is of Bambrugh castle. It was taken with the digital Nikon D2H camera and has become a very popular image. The photograph was captured on the busy beach dunes during a rather changeable day in mid August. I had to time the shooting carefully because the dunes were busy with tourists but eventually the dunes cleared briefly and the image you see was taken. Considering the difficulties with the weather and the hordes of people...it came out perfect.

Early in the year i decided that i wanted to create a better online presence for my work. I decided to link my main website with others i developed which led to the myspace page, the Imagekind page and this blog. I plan to develop these projects and others during 2008 with another smaller photo website planned for launch in the spring. There will be a few alterations to the main website too which is in the first stage of its new look. I hope to get the next stage complete by the summer 2008. Any news about new projects and developments will, of course, be posted here on the blog first.

The blog has developed nicely over the last ten months and I'm really having fun writing and posting images. Over the last ten months I've posted 132 times - a lucky 13.2 posts a month on average. It's important to me that the blog remains interesting so i intend to keep the subjects covered in the postings as broad as possible - as always feedback is always welcome. The new year will see the monthly photographer 'profile' series of postings feature some of the big names of photography like Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Some lesser known photographers will also be included.

Several projects were undertaken during the year including photography in Norfolk, Northumberland and, more locally, York. I've decided to start the Year in York project from scratch starting in January. That way it works better as a series of images; the images will have a better narrative structure when the project is finally completed. The other photo projects remain ongoing and i hope to return to them next year. I do have some initial ideas for a couple of new photography projects that will start in the next few months. In the meantime I'm going to do some studio work including several images using 1940's lighting techniques from the Walter Nurnberg book i purchased during the summer. Details about these lighting 'experiments' and the resulting photographs will be posted in the coming weeks.

All in all its been a great year for my photography and i look forward to snapping away in 2008. Have a Happy New Year.

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