January 6 2013

I hope 2013 has started well for everyone !

Having taken a few days after the New Year to reflect on the passing of 2012 and the finalization of my 365 Project, I thought I would share some highlights of the past year when I decided to re-kindle my passion for photography.

First, some numbers…having worked for 7+ years in market research, I still have a passion for numbers:

• Photographs taken: 20,000

Well this is what I have in my Lightroom 2012 folder. It doesn’t include the thousands of images taken for the few time-lapse films I shot, or the hundreds (if not thousands) of images that I didn’t save due to their poor quality – there’s probably still a few thousand I could happily delete. Quite a few were bracketed shots for producing HDR images. Still, I can probably say I took around 50 ‘reasonable’ shots per day during 2012 – a few more than the 1 per day I set out to take 😉

• Photographs posted: 4,000

For me, this is probably a more interesting statistic since these were the ones I felt to be decent enough to share publicly. If I consider I spent on average 5 minutes processing each image, I start to see where my year was spent – over 300 hours pushing sliders in Lightroom – good job I enjoy the post processing as much as taking the photograph 🙂

One regret though…I wish I had worn a pedometer during my photowalks. I know some days I covered quite large distances. In fact 1 week I estimated I had walked about 70km…something to consider if I ever do another 365 project.

In case you want to see the daily images posted over the year, I’ve updated the pages showing the picture of the day by month, or if you prefer, I put together a little slideshow to save you clicking through 366 images:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tilhyJFx1g?rel=0]

Each image holds a particular memory for me and is one of the great outcomes of the project and is certainly something I would attempt again and encourage others to do the same. Some days were extremely tough either due to the lack of inspiration, time restriction or inclement weather.

Although I have a number of favorite images taken over the year, I wanted to highlight my own 12 favorite pics of 2012.

I would love to know which your favorites were. I have an album over on Facebook which you can always flip through and hit the like button on your favs 😉

I’m hoping one day soon to get around to creating a book using Blurb (or one of the other self-publishing tools). Does anyone have any recommendations for which service to use ?

So enough of the past…what for 2013 ?

Today was actually the first day I went out specifically looking to shoot since completing the 365 project. As I mentioned in my last post of 2012, I intend to complete a 52 Project in 2013, which given I will have less time to dedicate to photography will hopefully force me to keep shooting and improve my photography skills. 6 days into the New Year, I was cutting it close to not making the first week, but I’ll be posting a few images from today within the next 24 hours.

There are quite a few places I didn’t get to photograph in 2012, so I want to try and explore more areas of Montreal (as well as outside the city) this year.

Another big wish for 2013 is that I would really like to learn more about making time-lapse movies and hope that without the need to shoot each day I will find a little time to dedicate to this pursuit.

So what plans do you have for 2013 ? Anyone starting (or continuing) their own 365 project ?

Whatever your plans….I wish you the very best for 2013.

Thanks for stopping by.

– Martin

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