i seem to be an ellipse...

…hasn’t been as bad a year as I thought. At Flickr’s encouragement, I’m once again working on figuring out my best shot of the year.

(last year’s “best shot”)

I might have made sounds of exasperation when I saw the flickr blog post initially, thinking it had been a bit of a failure of a year, photo-wise, but looking back, it seems it wasn’t all that bad. 

I wanted to pick my favorite without looking, on the theory that the most memorable was the best. 

This is the one I remembered. It was the first photo I edited on my big monitor and I’m pretty proud of how it turned out. Maybe this one wins the award for most technical skill put in. I learned a lot of new tricks working on this one and being able to see the very smallest of details.

Another that came to mind was this one:

The challenge of my first 365 project (2010) was just taking a damn photo each day. 2011 was a year of pushing boundaries to keep it going on the days when I felt like they were all starting to look the same and when I felt like I was out of subjects. 

The series at Heritage Days this year scared the shit out of me. I’m a shy person. I can’t control it. I’ve come a long way in recent years, but there are still many things concerning people and the places they’re likely to be plentiful that make me nervous. A crowd of complete strangers would be one thing, but this involved a crowd of former teachers, classmates, employers, family friends, acquaintances, etc., none of whom people I’m ever eager to run into. On top of that, carnival people are some of the oddest and scariest of all. And I’ve read too many photographer-as-terrorist articles. (There’s a former blog post that links to some that I’m not going to dig up here.) So I earned my official “small-time street photographer” badge here. “Most Improved,” perhaps.

I love this one, too, for the mixture of expressions, especially on the people towards the back, but the composition’s kind of cluttered and iffy, so I have to favor the empty swings.

When I actually allowed myself to look, I came up with a lot of “oh yeah, I didn’t realize that was this year!” 

This one, after looking, came into the running for my top picks:

It’s from the same split-toning-obsessed phase as the first two. :) And it was the product of another obsession, after I’d seen a macro photo on tumblr of mist on a dandelion. I spent a fair portion of my summer misting dandelions. And because of the title I chose for it on a whim, it has a theme song, which I get stuck in my head every single time I look at it, and thus wins the “Multimedia Experience” award.

I love its also-aptly-titled sibling just as much:

And then there are those that remind me of the year’s odd adventures:

This one was a beast to edit because the light was weird and the colors were all over the place. Sometimes I think the ones I spend the most time with are the ones I become the most attached to.

Perhaps the biggest physical adventure of the year: the 14-mile, twisty-as-a-corkscrew, let’s-climb-over-some-beaver-dams kayak trip that left me sunburned and sore-armed for a week. What doesn’t kill us proves that we can do that without getting killed. Or whatever.

And speaking of odd adventures…

This wouldn’t really have been one of my favorites, but it’s the only photo I’ve ever had make it to Explore on Flickr, so I suppose that makes it one of my noteworthy photos of the year.

And I can’t talk about 2011 without mentioning the recent Great Festival of the 11s:

I do not plan on celebrating 12-12-12 in things shaped like 12s. So that’s the last of those this century.

I haven’t quite chosen a winner. I’m not that decisive. Right now I’m leaning toward this one:

Not because it’s brilliant as a photograph, but because it makes me feel all sparkly and fuzzy and rainbows and unicorns inside.

The slide is from the end of 2010’s rush to experience Kodachrome while I still could. I got the slides back mid-January. They weren’t particularly good, but it was a cool experience. And there’s something inherently magical about holding something up to the light to reveal an image. (All photos look better that way.) So maybe that’s, metaphorically, the most representative of the year. Finding wonder in new experiences. I could go with that. 

Or I might not. I still have a couple weeks to decide.

[my 2011 photos]

I haven’t blogged photos much since I said I was letting myself off the hook for doing it every week out of perceived obligation. So I’m doing it when I feel like it, for fun, now. 

Lately:  I’m in a perfect camera-place. Nikon D80, iPhone 4S*. I can live with this. I don’t feel the need for another camera, for the first time in a zillion years. 

Also in love with black and white. Again, as always, still.

**

*Nevermind the film camera collection for the purposes of this discussion, which is supposed to be about simplification.

**Not really black and white but whatevs.

Also toying with complicated concepts like whether I should do another 365 (presently at 682 I think—317 into the second year). And if I do, how? But that’s for another blog post.

Yesterday was my first full day with the iPhone. And a fully iphoned day it was.

I asked Siri the night before to wake me up at 10:30. I lifeguard at the Y on Saturday afternoons, and now that it’s cool out, it’s usually dead.

I read the front page of the New York Times, took a couple photos, checked twitter. Someone I follow had tweeted a link to a Guardian article on Haruki Murakami.

And there the magic happened. I love Haruki Murakami and I love reading articles about artists and writers. It inspires me, and before I know it, I’m so inspired that my mind is somewhere else. Realizing that I’m no longer in the article, but that I really do want to finish it, I start poking around—how about you sign up for instapaper and read it later?, the iPhone suggests (though not in so many words). Which is exactly what I want.

It strikes me that this is what makes this phone more pleasant to use than a blackberry or an android. On another smartphone, it feels like one is trying to bend one’s brain into the rigid structure of a computer. The iPhone feels like a computer that’s prepared to adapt to the illogical creative tangents of a real human. Part of what I wanted to test in using my iPhone all day was battery life, and it made it all day. I finished a novel (Dance Dance Dance—yes, Haruki Murakami), went to the park after work to take photos, used it for music in my car, played some games, used it as a row counter while knitting, and finally dropped off to sleep at 1:30, as the battery died while playing The Sims. 

And! for the first time, I’ve been able to turn off twitter email notifications because push notifications really work! And my emails sync up with my computer properly! Six years in smartphones and this is just now working for me!

I had my reservations about this phone purchase. I’m not the sort of person who enjoys spending all day at a computer or playing with a phone, because I start to feel too detached from the “real world.” I never liked fiddling with my android much, and I debated whether someone like me is better off just getting a plain old flip phone (though I hate phones more than any of the other smartphone functions, for that matter). But to my surprise, I spent all day doing stuff with my phone and didn’t feel detached at all. On the contrary, it’s portability and wealth of available functions (I can’t even think of anything I want to do that I don’t have an app for!) helped me feel more richly involved in the world by making the things I love to do easy and convenient. 

But I can’t write an iphone review this gushy for free. So I’ll add some minor complaints:

1. A few camera annoyances from someone who’s very picky about cameras, especially ones this hyped:

1a. I can’t get my damn hands to stay out of photos. This is mostly a consequence of switching from a phone with a lens right in the center to this silly corner thing. It’s more stable (de-blurred) to hold a phone with one’s hands kind of wrapped over the corners, but I’ll eventually develop new gripping methods and adapt. I’ve adapted already by covering up the pink fleshy corner glow with some dark vignetting!

1b. I’m used to cameras and cameraphones that focus for a second after or during the button press. I like to think this lessens blur a bit by allowing the camera to re-steady itself after the physical jiggle of having the button pressed. It seems all the focusing here happens before the button press, which may work just as well, for all I know, but I find it slightly unsettling all the same.

1c. I took some photos in late-afternoon sunlight and my white balance is all over the map. My android camera had, by default, user-preset white balance available. But I’m sure there’s an app for that, so it’s not too much of a complaint. Generally wish the default camera app had more options than grid/no grid, hdr/no hdr, and flash/no flash.

1d. Speaking of late afternoon sunlight, random rainbow streaks. Not cool. Well kind of cool in the way that all rainbows are, but still not always the desired effect.

1e. If only I could get Photostream to stream directly to Lightroom. I set up iphoto to use Lightroom for editing, so I’m just using iPhoto as a holding bin for phone photos, which is an arrangement I can live with, but still uses one more piece of software than is strictly necessary. 

2. Battery life always gets worse, and while it’s quite reasonable right now, I see it becoming annoyingly too short within a year or so. Yeah, yeah. I’ll get one of those fancy portable charger things and deal with it, but this is not how my smartphone of the future fantasies go. 

3. Siri and her friend Wolfram don’t seem to know the land speed of a groundhog. I didn’t have more pertinent questions to ask. I’m not great at conversing with strangers.