It feels great to be publishing my very 1st image of 2012 today. I had planned a full afternoon and night shoot last Saturday. The intention was to work from pre-sunset all the way through to a star filled night. Unfortunately the weather had very different idea’s. This year though I made a commitment to myself, to look beyond the obvious and seek out a photographic opportunity in every situation. So knowing what the weather had in store for me I headed out with the above image envisioned very squarely (pardon the pun) in my minds eye. I didn’t need a grand vista or a beautiful warm sunset for this image, just as well given the weather. Indeed quite the opposite in fact, balanced neutral colour and a light blanket of cloud was exactly what I was looking for.

I still absolutely love the grand vistas of Irish Landscapes and plan to continue to capture all sorts of landscapes around Ireland in 2012. I’ve already planned out the year in terms of locations and travel and am looking forward to both; returning to old haunts and visiting brand new locations.

However I also want to look at the more intimate landscape also. To some extent it is taking my Nature’s Detail ongoing project and applying the same principles to the landscape around me. When, in early January I posted my image Waves Upon the Rock taken in Donegal last year I talked about “wishing to experiment a lot more with abstract type work” and that initial thought has begun to solidify into a clearer vision of the next phase of my photographic journey. While not quite abstract the image I share with you today is minimal and for me represents a level of isolation. There is only a hint of context in this image.

I hope you enjoy this image and I look forward to sharing my journey with you throughout the year.

Camera: Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Lens: Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L IS
Exposure: 30 secs
Aperture: f/18
Focal Length: 45mm
ISO Speed: 50

I wanted to share another image with you today from my trip to Donegal from September. This time a panoramic, one of several I took during my six day trip. This is Mount Errigal, or simply Errigal (Irish: An Earagail, possibly meaning “oratory”). It is a 751 metres (2,464 ft) mountain near Gweedore in County Donegal. It is the tallest peak of the Derryveagh Mountains, the tallest peak in County Donegal, and the 76th tallest peak in Ireland. Errigal is also the most southern, steepest and highest of the mountain chain, called the “Seven Sisters” by locals. (source Wiki)

I was traveling to the Poison Glen and as I was driving I was fascinated watching the landscape change constantly as the clouds swept across the sky overhead. Every so often the sun would peek through the clouds and cast a warm glow on some new part of the landscape. Mount Errigal was on the way to the Poison Glen and so I passed it during this constantly changing light. Being from the east coast of Ireland mountains form somewhat of a curiosity for me. The east coast of Ireland is very sheltered and has very few mountain ranges and none of a height to compete with this or indeed many others along the north and west coast of Ireland.  So what else could I do but stop!

This scene I felt really needed ‘breadth’ and therefore a panoramic was the only chose, but what was I to do? The landscape was changing too swiftly and so my normal methodical approach to shooting a panoramic using a Tripod just would not suit. So I shot a handheld panoramic, something I had toyed with before but this was the first time I had tried it for ‘real’. What you see here is 4 landscape orientated imaged stitched together and the cropped to a 4:1 ratio.

I don’t produce a lot of Black & White imagery. In fact I produced just 3 last year. Hey what can I say, we live in a colour world! However from time to time, and I seem to say this every time I produce one; some images just scream B&W at me. And… yes you guessed it, this was one of those images. I felt the Black & White brought the Landscape down to its basic forms; the texture of the cloud covered sky, the undulating landscape, and of course the focus of the image; the beautiful sunlight upon that dominating mountain peak.

Back in June last year I shared an image of a Calla Lilly called Hidden from Sight that eventually made it into my Top 10 Favourite images of 2011. It was taken during a visit to our local Botanic Gardens which many of you will know is a favourite spot of mine. I mentioned in that original post that I had come across a bed of Calla Lilies outside one of the greenhouses and was compelled to try to capture an image of a flower I have always found difficult to do justice too. I described the process in which I focused on the details rather than the entire flower. This approach is something that has fueled my ongoing Nature’s Detail project and even after 2 years I’m still as passionate as ever about it.

Today I wanted to share another composition from that same session. Indeed it proved a very succesful little outing with this flower as I came away with a number of compositions that I was very pleased with, and will share more with you over the coming months. One of the things that I believe is often missed with this flower is the very fine lines that course through the Spate (ne Petal to you and me). I decided to back light the flower using a flash and a large reflector to draw this particular detail out. This use of lighting provided an almost ethereal feel to the flower which I really liked. Allowing some blurred background to remain in the composition helps to ground the petal to its environment.

Camera: Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Lens: Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM
Exposure: 1/100
Aperture: f/8
Focal Length: 100mm
ISO Speed: 200

Here’s something a little bit different from me. I plan to experiment this year with a lot more abstract type work. And with that in mind I started to experiment a little over the last few months of 2011. This image was taken during my visit to Donegal last September. I was out shooting an amazing sunrise at Rathmullen Beach. The golden colours on this morning were simply beautiful and the way the light reflected off the rocks really captured my attention. It was a relatively calm morning and I spent some time almost in a trance watching the ebb and flow of the waves gliding over the rocks near the shore.

I wanted to capture some of that movement while also taking in the beautiful golden colours reflecting off the rocks. I used a Circular Poloriser to manage the harsher reflections upon the rocks and a 3 and a 2 stop ND Grads to allow me to slow down the shutter speed to 4 secs. The slower shutter speed was long enough to allow me to capture the motion in the waves without loosing form and shape as it washed over the rocks.

Of course the other difference here is the Square format. I am fascinated with this presentation, harking back to the Medium Format days and would like to consider shooting more square compositions in future. Indeed the last time I presented a square format with Yellow on Green back in October 2010 and it proved a very popular image.

Camera: Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Lens: Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM
Exposure: 4 sec
Aperture: f/16
Focal Length: 27mm
ISO Speed: 50

Well firstly let me start off by wishing you all a very happy New Year. I have big plans for this year and am looking forward to getting started. Indeed after the clue I presented in last weeks post on My Top 10 Favourite Images from 2011 I am adding yet another clue today on at least one of those plans

One of the images that made it into my Top 10 for last year was a piece entitled A Line of Crocuses which I originally shared with you in March. I just realised that while I did publish an alternate composition to my Galleries I never discussed it on my blog. So I am correcting that today, with the very first post of 2012.

What strikes me when looking at both of these images of the same subject, in this case a line of 3 tiny little purple crocuses is how simple changes in composition can alter a scene dramatically. In this landscape orientated image for instance that sunlight plays a much more important role vs the portrait image which is a much more intimate piece focusing solely on the flowers. Technically the images are identical in terms of camera settings sharing the same focal length, aperture and shutter speed. The only thing that changed between these two images, that were taken less than a minute and a half apart was how I positioned myself in the context of the subject.

Well here we stand at the very edge of 2011; 2012 just within sight. It’s that time of year again; and as promised last week and again on Tuesday I am sharing my personal Top 10 favourite images from this year. As it has proved every year I have done this since 2008 (2009 & 2010) it has not been an easy task. While I may not have published as many images this year vs 2010 (which I discussed on Tuesday in my Year in Review article) it still proved difficult.

The final set is a fairly even spread across Landscapes, Seascapes and Floral Macro pieces in addition to being spread throughout the year. I was delighted to see that two images from my Donegal trip featured in my final selection and can not wait to share more from that trip with you as we step in to 2012. I was also happy to see that a number of more abstract floral images also made it into the final list. This was something I begun to experiment with this year and plan to do more in 2012. The 40 foot in Dublin is a very well photographed location but I do feel I captured something unique with my visit there a couple of months ago and new very early on in my selection process that it would make it to the final 10. As I did with my 1st nightscape that I only published a few weeks ago, there is something quite magical in capturing the night-sky and I have already planned several more locations for next year. And finally, I found it interesting when reviewing this final selection that all 3 of the panoramic images I produced in 2011 made it into the list, I guess I need to make special note of this as I step into 2012.

So there you have it, my own personal 10 favourties for 2010. It proved a busy year commercially but that did not stop me from producing personal pieces that I am very proud of. I am very excited about 2012 and how I will continue to refine both my craft and vision. Indeed planning is well under way and you will see some fairly significant changes very early on in the new year that I can’t wait to share with you. There is a clue in the way I have presented these image for one of those changes

Until we meet in 2012 I’d just like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very Happy New Year!

Hey by the way did I miss any of your favourites in this list, let me know in the comments below?

• A Wicklow Landscape | Early Morning upon Lough Tay – Co Wicklow, Ireland
• A Floral Image | A Line of Crocuses
• A Floral Image | Purple Haze
• A Floral Image | Hidden from Sight
• A Wicklow Panoramic | The Sun and the Moon – Wicklow Mountains, Ireland
• A Donegal Seascape | Clear Day Ahead – Donegal, Ireland
• A Floral Image | Lavender Tips
• A Donegal Seascape | Storm Clouds and Crashing Waves – Donegal, Ireland
• A Dublin Seascape | Dawn at the Forty Foot – Dublin, Ireland
• A Wicklow Nightscape | A Star Filled Sky – Wicklow Mountains, Ireland

Gallery

• Personal Favourites, 2011

It was a fairly quite year from a personal photographic perspective this year, primarily because it was such a commercially busy year. And it gives me a great deal of pleasure to be able to say that. The long hours of dedication to both the craft and marketing began to pay off this year. One project in particular, which is still on going took up a lot of my time. Unfortunately I can’t share much about it with you at this time but am looking forward to discussing it towards the middle of next year when we wrap things up. Suffice it to say that I have produced over 150 fully post produced images for the project so far. From someone who was happily producing 40 or 50 Fine Art images a year that was quite some change in pace for me. Indeed that was something I needed to get used to this year as I completed more corporate assignment work also. The nature of the work not only had me shooting more but also demanded I produce far more finished images then I was used to from a single shoot. For instance during a one and a half day corporate conference I covered during the year I produced 125 finished images; that’s actually over three times what I produced in personal work for the entire year. I’m reminded of a statement I made last year..

“I do find it interesting when I see other Photographers talk about the volume of images they shot or published in any given year – 1,000, 10,000 even 100,000 images. I suppose these numbers make a lot of sense if you’re an Event or Sports Photographer but as a Fine Art Photographer it just gives me the shivers.”

I guess I am beginning to experience these kind of volumes as I expand beyond Fine Art; of course I also need to ask my self  ”do I want to expand beyond Fine Art?” but that is for another post.

I had hoped to show more fancy graphs like I did last year about lenses used but that wonderful application I referred to last year “Aperture Inspector” seems to have disappeared off the face of the interweb and I can not get my hands on a new copy. A little disappointing given it was a paid app but I suppose they are the risks with purchasing from the “pop up shop” app developer types. Although for $10 I can’t complain too much. I have however cobbled together a few graphs to titillate you all

Last year I noted a nice progression in personal outings from 2008 of 23 to 29 to a total of 33 last year, well I suppose not surprising based on the lead-in to this article I had just 19 outings this year. Many of them were to stalwart locations that I simply love to return to, such as the Botanical Gardens and many locations around Wicklow. However there were some new locations also, such as Wexford, and the amazing Donegal which my wife whisked me away to for 6 days in September.

This year I decided to restructure my galleries, which I’ll talk a little bit more about in my Website section but you may note from the above that I removed the Topic ‘The Sun’ and added ‘The Sea’. The Sun Gallery is still on my site and contains any scene where the Sun plays an important part in the image, but I needed to be able to properly split those landscape images that captured the Sea vs the Land. The above graphic indicates how my published images break down by subject and there is no surprises in there for me. My love affair for Floral Macro work continues taking the lions share of my published work. Landscapes and Seascapes both take 2nd place with the other subjects following behind. I produced just 38 images in total this year which breakdown as follow’s;

Animal Magnetism (1)
At Night (1)
Nature’s Detail (21)
Objects (2)
The Land (6)
The Sea (7)
Waterworks (0)

In terms of image orientation things didn’t change tremendously this year with a slightly more even distribution between Portrait and Landscape over earlier years. I have commented before on how I naturally gravitate towards the Portrait Orientation however this year I made a more conscious effort to produce images with a Landscape orientation.

Portrait (17)
Landscape (18)
Panoramic (3)

And finally to Lens usage. Nothing has changed from a gear perspective in 2011, I still have just the 3 lenses above. Slight variation in distribution this year with the 70-200 seeing a slight reduction along with the 17-40 while the 100mm has increased. I must admit a little disappointment here as I intended to shoot a lot more with the 70-200, particularly landscapes but actually ended up just producing one Panoramic entitled The Sun and the Moon taken in the Wicklow mountains last Winter.

On the topic of gear, not much has changed this year at all really. I am blessed to have acquired some fantastic equipment over the last couple of years and while my wish list is long I have never let this hold me back. However I did get some ‘stuff’ this year. As many of you that read this blog regularly will know I replaced my aging MacPro with a new iMac in September which was driven by the aforementioned demands place by my commercial work. Actually I wrote a fair few articles about it including the unboxing and first impressions as well as a list of likes and dislikes. I also picked up an iPad 2 earlier this month which I am really enjoying so stay tuned for a photographically orientated review of that on the site early next year. From an actual photographic perspective I did pick up a Visible Dust cleaning kit for my camera which I plan to also review in the new year. Oh, Santa did bring me one Photographic related present a couple of days ago; a lovely new Camera Bag which again I will review sometime in the new year. Still no 24-105mm though but maybe 2012 will bring it?!

2011 saw another significant update of my presence here on the interweb. After the complete site overhaul in July 2010 I spent the rest of that year living with the new site and tweaking as I went. However I also uncovered some pretty major parts of the site that I was unhappy with and that simple tweaks would not address. So early in 2011 I set about a rework, not as large a project as the original revamp but a pretty major piece of work nevertheless. Indeed as I noted in my June blog post announcing the new site I ended up writing more than 850 lines of code, no facet of the site remained untouched. You can read more details from that original post here. As you can imagine that rework took a significant amount of time and had an impact on my ability to add new posts to the blog with the same regularity I had in 2010. One of the major changes I made to the structure of the website was my galleries. I have already mentioned above the introduction of a ‘The Sea’ Gallery however I also created 2 brand new gallery collections. The first organises my landscape images by the location they were captured in, and the 2nd organises all my images by their dominant colour. My website analytics along with customer feedback indicates that these were (are) very well received as it allows visitors to quickly view a location they are interested in; or a colour that they are looking to match with their home decor.

When I launched the new site in 2010 I aimed to produce 3 posts a week, mainly about my images; and I delivered on that throughout the year. In 2011 I realised that was untenable in the long-term and I reduced it to just 1 or 2 a week. However during heavy periods of the site rework like February, April and May I actually only published 3 articles a month!

This inevitably had an effect on the traffic to my site and that is very clear from the graphic above. Let nobody tell you otherwise and I spoke about this last year also; running a website is hard work and needs constant attention. However it is not all bad news as the dip during the quite periods on the blog is still 10 times what it was on my old site where I did little in the way of SEO or Social Media Engagement. I am also seeing a nice return to the kind of traffic I saw late last year; and that is with less than half of the content I was publishing.

And talking of SEO and Social Media this is where I see a very different story to last year, and indeed why visits remained relatively high even during quiet periods on the blog. My search traffic accounted for just 26% in 2010 where as it now accounts for nearly half of the site traffic. Traffic from the good folks over at PhotoShelter has seen a 50% increase no doubt due to them interviewing me in August for their featured photographer profiles. Also I see a big change in the traffic that Twitter and Facebook drove to my site, something I will need to spend some time figuring out early next year. Google+ appears on the list this year which is very impressive given it only formally launched to the public in September. G+ will definitely get a lot of attention from me next year. Digital Photography School which is a great website for all things photography related was a surprise to me though. DPS featured mine among another 161 talented photographers list of Top 10 images for the year 2010 which had been kindly curated by the very talented Jim M. Goldstein and this post alone was enough to drive 5% of my site traffic. I guess I need to spend some time with the good folks over on DPS in 2012.

And where were all those site visitors from? Well this is another change from last year, while the Top 3 have remained the same the US has gone from 23% to 30%, UK is up by 1% while Ireland has dropped by 8%.

And to finish this little post I’d like to share the top 10 posts from the blog for 2010;

1. My Top 10 Favourite Images of 2010 (793 Views)
2. A Wicklow Landscape | Glenmacnass Waterfall – Wicklow, Ireland (585 Views)
3. A Dublin Seascape | Sunrise upon the Rocks – Howth, Dublin, Ireland (430 Views)
4. A Dublin Landscape | The Hell Fire Club – Dublin Mountains, Ireland (407 Views)
5. 2010 in numbers (or Stats, Stats and more Stats) (295 Views)
6. A Wicklow Seascape | Sunrise at Greystones Beach – Wicklow, Ireland (254 Views)
7. A Wicklow Landscape | Early Morning upon Lough Tay – Wicklow, Ireland (245 Views)
8. My New iMac | Unboxing and First Impressions (191 Views)
9. Complete Site Revamp – Part I, A History (173 Views)
10. A Donegal Seascape | Wild Seas at Fanad Lighthouse – Donegal, Ireland (162 Views)

An interesting mix in their with 3 of the 10 being non- image related. The Top 10 from last year was a clear winner with an astounding number of views and I am really looking forward to hearing your responses to the 2011 list. This same post from 2010 is at #5 so I guess it is worth while me writing this one. Interesting to see #10 as I only published this in November but it certainly has been a very popular image during my recent print sale also.