Little is certain any more in this world, but I try to at least offer you a small amount of comfort by at least posting here once a year on the anniversary of my setting up of this site, reflecting on the year gone and speculating on the year to come. It’s a tradition I’ve managed to keep up for thirteen years at this point, even in the years where everything has gone off the rails and I’ve posted nothing else in the preceding twelve months.
So what to make of 2023? I made six posts here, which is still nowhere near the level I’d like, but it was an improvement on the four posts in 2022, itself a five-year high. It was another assorted year, starting with a long-overdue post of a flyby that happened in London during another lifetime in 2018, followed by some photographs of our local area (probably taken in 2019), some photographs of a steam railway (from a holiday in 2018), some photographs from a museum exhibit (from 2019), some photographs of the wildlife I’d seen from my garden (mostly taken in 2020), and finally, some photographs of the Red Arrows (that were actually taken in 2023).
As you can probably see from the dates of some of those posts, I’ve still got a decent amount of images in my backlog that I am working my way through, and I fully intend to eventually finish posting. That said, it felt very good to publish Red Arrow Flyby, a post in the old-school tradition of Creative Splurges – luck into a photo opportunity, then get the results edited and published in relatively short order.
Red Arrow Flyby ended up being the last post of 2023, weirdly echoing 2022, where my last post also came in mid-August. I suspect it’s because that’s around the time that work starts getting busy and I start getting tired, and I’m just not in the routine of posting enough yet for it to happen without effort. Getting into that habit is the main thing I want to work on, because I am at least getting out and taking photographs, albeit nowhere near as regularly as I used to, but don’t often get round to editing or sharing them.
If you remember my update from last year, past of the reason the posts stopped in 2022 was the death of my computer sometime in August. 2023 started with me finally replacing it with a laptop, which has made editing theoretically easier as I don’t need to retire to my desk to work on photos. Setting it up was such an experience in itself I considered making a post about it, as my local backup hard drive had started to fail, meaning I needed to set up the computer as new (rather than restoring from a backup), and some of my files needed to be restored from my second, online backup. The lesson I wanted to impart was an important one that you may already know if you work in IT: the number of backups you actually have is one less than the number of backups you think you have. In my case, the dying part of the backup drive was where my photographs resided, so it could have been catastrophic if I didn’t have a second backup to fall back on. Make sure you have at least two backups of any data you care about, and make sure one of those backups is not in your house.
I have taken some traditional steps to get back into the habit of taking photographs this year too. Firstly, back in summer I bought myself a new camera in the form of a Canon EOS R6 Mark II, finally upgrading the EOS 60D I’ve been using for almost the entire history of this site, and making the jump to full frame I’d been considering for years. When I bought it, I was thinking I’d either buy a new fancy lens, or a new camera – I’d been eyeing up the EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L as something to improve my people photography, considering a decent amount of what I’ve been photographing lately is my family. I did end up buying a new lens too – I bought the RF 16mm f/2.8 as an even wider angle lens, even though all of my lenses became a bit more wide angle with the switch to full frame.
It didn’t quite scratch the itch, and over Christmas I hired an RF 24-70mm f/2.8 L lens, partly because I got a good deal on the hire, and partly because I wanted to play about with one, slightly hoping I’d not be that impressed with it in order to shake the desire to own one. I wasn’t able to play with it as much as I’d intended (we were visited by the Ghost of Christmas Covid), but as someone who is usually always chasing the shallowest depth of field possible (especially when photographing people), I really did enjoy using it. Over Christmas I revisited a previous idea and took a photo of our Christmas tree out-of-focus, which came out very nicely at f/2.8, although I didn’t find an opportunity to post it, so here it is.
I’m not running out to buy one straight away – it costs far too much for an impulse purchase, and I need to figure out if only having a 70mm reach instead of 105mm will cause me headaches, but I would still very much like one. My current plan is to go back to using my EF 24-105 f/4 L and see how much I miss the other lens. (As an aside, I am aware than Canon have announced an RF 24-105mm f/2.8 L lens, but it is both a lot heavier and a decent amount more expensive.)
So apart from attempting to justify extravagant purchases, what else might be in store for 2024? Frankly, it’s going to be the same thing I’ve been saying at the end of these posts for a few years now: try to get back into the habit of shooting, editing and posting more. Clearly I’m (very slowly) getting better, but I used to be a lot better still. I have a backlog of images I’ve got no excuse to not share, and some ideas I’ve been meaning to try for some time that I’ve not gotten round to, so all the pieces are there, I just need to make it a habit to put them together. My wife did get me a photography experience at a local wildlife centre, so I at least have that coming up.
It’s also a tradition to end these posts with a self portrait. Originally I liked to say it was reflective of the photographic skills I’d learned in the year. Nowadays I just say it’s showing me getting older. And probably helping train an AI somewhere. This year’s photo was just a quick shot I grabbed with my new camera and my hired lens over Christmas. Nothing fancy, partly because I wasn’t intending on sharing it when I took it.
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Rob