It's been a little bit more than a year since I decided to pick up photography (15 months ago to be exact). But, realistically, right around the first of this year was when I started taking photography more seriously and started taking (what I would consider), photographs that didn't suck.
In a matter of a year, I feel like I've accomplished a lot of things and created stunning images that take others years and years to do. In my mind, it came down to my desire to grow and learn as much about photography as possible. But, more importantly, I experimented and that's probably where most of my luck came in.
All of you avid readers of my blog know that Joel Grimes has had a huge impact on my photography. Originally, I thought his images were done in an HDR format and I decided to combine that style with my desire of being the next Ansel Adams. I definitely had the last name for it (Ansel and Ancell are close enough, right?) and I thought that it would best allow me to do one other thing that I've always wanted to do, travel.
I can't argue though, because my landscape photography took me on a 5000 mile road trip across the Western United States. I got to see some of the most amazing landscapes that the United States has to offer and documented it all through my camera. Two of my favorite images from the trip are Hole in the Wall (Antelope Canyon) and On the Water (Aspen, Colorado).
After the road trip, heeding the advice of one of my good friends, I decided to try my hand at Portraits so I didn't limit myself to anything. He told me to try my hand at portraits before I committed myself to any style of photography and well I guess you all know how that turned out.
Once again, I hit the books to try to understand a little bit better the process behind Joel Grimes images. Through reading his tutorials on his website and a tutorial in Scott Kelby's book, I started doing a Joel Grimes style but not anywhere near as good.
I got a chance to attend his workshop in November and it really changed the whole way I looked at photography. I finally had the confidence to take my photography to another level and realized that I have talent when it comes to photography.
I have so many different Sportraits and Portraits from the past three months but I'm going to make you wait a couple days before you find out my favorite of the year (keep on reading, you'll understand what I'm talking about).
Over the past year, I signed up for a Pro Flickr account which allowed me to track people visiting my photos and recorded stats throughout the year. I do have to say the first couple of months were pretty slow but once I started dabbling in HDR (around March), the views started to grow.
I have high hopes that I'll be able to grow this to a much larger extend by the end of next year. I hope to have over 250,000 views which means I need to quadruple the amount of views on my account. I don't see this as a problem because realistically, I could say that the first 3 months of my pro account didn't see more than 100 views total. I'll continue to grow as a photographer and add techniques to my images that will make them more impressive than before.
Either tomorrow or on New Years, I'm going to post my images of the year. I'll try to include photos from various different categories, i.e. Best Image of the Year, Best Landscape, Best Portrait, Biggest Catastrophe, Most time spent on an individual image (you'd be surprised how long). But, I'm also hoping to put up a Viewers Choice Award. I'll either take the images that I choose in the categories I said above, or if I get some suggestions on which photos were your favorites and then create a poll for you all to vote in. I'll even try to come up with some sort of prize for one of the voters chosen at random.
So make sure you check back and vote when the time comes. Maybe you'll end up as the prize winner!
;)
Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at 7:00AM 
