Looking back to help you go forwards

It's time for the typical reflective look at the year and a look to the future. For me it's been a year of many changes, I was taking time over the Christmas break 2007 when I was pointed in the direction of Mark Briggs' Journalism 2.0 a PDF, information about the internet in a 2.0 type world. The page I found it on was www.kcnn.org/resources/journalism_20_pdfs/, you can also find information about the book on Mark's blog.
This holiday period was also the first time that I bought music on the back of hearing it as backing music to a bloggers videos. Feist's album The Reminder and Frou Frou's Details were the start, later in the year Everyday Jones after the video from David Tejada - thanks for opening my ears aswell as my eyes.

The Journalism 2.0 book seemed to connect with something in my brain and I then went on a google fest to get more information on blogging, rss and other such topics. It wasn't until June that this blog came into being, but it's been an interesting few months since it has.

I've been working to improve my own photo skills and that's meant diversions in the directions of some great photo oriented blogs and some that aren't photo related. Thanks to all the bloggers who've provided great free content to help me learn. Strange input came from Garth Carr's Presentation Zen and also a font blog!

I discovered that my photo club Imagez had suddenly turned in to a place with loads of great photographers who were all creative, and were producing stunning images. As a club Imagez had gone on a three year recruitment drive by offering photography courses for the same cost as membership of the club. Club members got the option to go on the courses free, course attendees were welcome to join the club for free. A fantastic approach, arguably marketing the same thing differently to different people. However when it comes to competitions I'm still trying to work out how to improve my pictures.

I also became a flickr user and was keen to see how people are using the medium to share their work. One Icelandic photographer with a passion for night time landscapes in Iceland was the start, then like many others Miss Aniela and finally the story of Aaron and Rosie. I managed to catch up with a photographer I'd met some years ago through flickr too. Thanks Peter for the stunning shot of Agnes that became my new computer wallpaper.

In my own work I've felt that I've reached a milestone, with some nice sales of several images. Not enough to give up work and become a full time photographer, but an option for a new lens or two [the curse of the amateur; more gear = better pictures]. I also started to realise that a lot of what I was missing in my pictures was related to widening my horizons. I wrote a post in the summer about this and my trial with the Canon EF 20mm f/2.8 USM lens. End result was some great pre-planned photos whilst on holiday - almost a first for me to really research a location and see how other people had shot it. Thank you to all the flickr users who posted images with the Sandymouth tag.

I also had several great opportunities to share my little knowledge of photography and Canon's EOS cameras, and I got a really good buzz from these activities. I must have finally got the point that sharing my knowledge with others was the important thing for me.

Canon and Nikon both had something new in DSLR - VIDEO and in Canon's EOS 5D Mark II Full 1920 x 1080 High Definition video. Vincent Laforet caused a whole lot of head scratching at Canon, boy did that cause some trouble for the internet providers as suddenly thousands of photographers wanted to see high definition video on the web. Where do you host that kind of stuff, and how do stills photographer struggling to get on the ball with digital and all it's new delights suddenly get video thrown at them too.

Fast forward to late November and in a point of being particularly out of steam mentally I hit on a post on Chase Jarvis' site where he shared a great 80 minutes long video of himself, David 'the Strobist' Hobby and David Nightingale from Cromasia. The three of them summed it up in a panel presentation and Q&A session that had been held at Gulf Photo Plus earlier in 2008. In short, if you share for the reason of sharing to help others then it will have it's own rewards and they are not all monetary. Chase gets free hiking boots!


And so to 2009...
more blogging - time to contribute my bit to the world, see you there

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