My top ten photos for 2007

2007 was a huge year for me photographically. I started Project 365, started making friends in the photography blog community, dramatically expanded my skills by reading the Strobist blog, and started feeling a whole lot more comfortable taking photos. This year was something of a turning point I feel, where I went from a photographer with everything to learn, to one with so many possibilities. It was also a very important year for setting up the groundwork for 2008, even though I didn't know what was coming, but which now looks like it will be another turning point year. As a retrospective of the year in photography, I've chosen my ten favourite photos for the year and listed them below, in chronological order, with a little discussion about each photo. I've chosen pictures that I feel were important for various reasons, such as what I learned in the process, how they made me feel and which made me most proud. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I did taking them. Remember, you can click on any image for a larger view. Seeing this once-in-a-lifetime astronomical spectacular was incredibly moving and awe-inspiring. I had to express my emotions at the scene, and my mobile phone was handy... I was very happy with how my photos of the comet turned out. If you'd like to see a "real" astrophotographer's photos of the comet, allow me to recommend to you my exceptionally gifted friend Phil Hart. If I was to pick one photo of these ten as my favourite, it would be this. This sunset was truly one of the most magnificent I've ever seen. Everyone in the town stopped to watch the spectacle and I shot many dozens of photos, trying to capture the glorious warm golden light that flooded the river. This is also my most successful attempt at a High Dynamic Range photo. I took three exposures at different settings to try and capture a broader range of detail in the highlights and shadows, and manually merged them together in photoshop. This cute little hut is part of a once private garden with a lake and beautiful trees, but which is now owned by the state parks authority. Although it is much photographed, I wanted to do something a little different and take a panorama of the scene. When I saw the mushrooms on the tree, I knew I had found my shot. This photo of air bubbles rising through water is a composite of three different photos. The bubbles are illuminated by a single flash with a coloured gel on the front. Several hundred shots were culled down to these three, to make an almost abstract collection of shiny, lumpy shapes. It would be hard to identify them if you didn't know what they were. Anna was kind enough to pose for me as I practiced off-camera portrait lighting. While I was setting things up I shot a number of test shots simply to check how the flash settings looked in-camera. Naomi was chatting to Anna about the light in our room, and Anna glanced up. Right at this moment I half-heartedly snapped another test shot. This "reject" shot quickly became my favourite portrait of the year because of the slightly over-exposed lighting and the quirky smile that says so much about Anna's personality. Colour and form alone can make a great photo. This beautiful, strange flower grows in the garden of a friend in the country. When we visited, I spent a couple of hours taking photos, and this macro shot was my favourite. I am especially proud of this photo, as it combines a number of specialist techniques and was very tricky to take. You can read more of the details in the linked blog entry. Beyond all the technical aspects of this photo, however, I think it's simply a beautiful photo of an incredible slice of natural history. This shot was also very good for my blog as it was featured in a post on the Strobist blog, and attracted a great number of visitors here. I love astronomy, and taking great photos of the stars is always a challenge I enjoy. I especially like this one, because it gives you a context. With the house in the foreground, you can see exactly that this is a view of the sky from this location. The galaxy looks beautiful as it makes its way up the sky, over the house. I'm proud of this one because it was part of my first on-location shoot lit primarily by flash. I managed to successfully apply many of the principles and techniques I have recently learned from the Strobist blog. And I'm happy with the end result, as were the models, for whom I did the shoot. This photo is a lesson in processing. These fluffy soft corals look brownish to the eye, but when I was processing this macro photo in lightroom, I bumped the saturation a little and saw the hint of some colour in there. So I kept moving the slider further and further up the scale and these gorgeous colours appeared. Technically this photo isn't a realistic representation of the coral, but it is beautiful, and those colours are actually in there, just very very subtle.