2015 has been a bizarre year for me, and I look back with mixed emotions on it. The most consuming thing has to have been the writing of ‘The Indispensable Guide to Lightroom CC’. I was writing close to 10,000 words a week for nearly 12 weeks, as well as creating all the screen shots, and doing all the edits and approving changes from the wonderful Maggie Yates at Rocky Nook. The initial pitch for the book happened through a chance conversation with Dave Clayton, and I’m delighted to have written for Rocky Nook on this project. All told, the first half to 2015 was leading towards the release of the book.
With something that pretty much told the entire first half of the year, where do you go to talk about what happened the rest of the year? I didn’t get to shoot as much personal work as I would’ve liked. Even at that a lot of the shots that were planned didn’t happen. We’ll look at the ones that did shortly.
Commercially, I was busy this year. There was my ongoing work for Carbon Nightclub, which included one photo of a couple kissing, where the fella was texting at the same, went viral. It was pulled from the club website after 4 hours (at the request of the girl’s father), where it already had 7000 likes and had been shared over 550 times on Joe.ie (with the headline ‘Romance isn’t dead’. You couldn’t really see the girl in the photo, but for the sake of her modesty, I’m not reposting it. Here’s a pre Halloween one instead!
I shot a lot of properties for Airbnb. Initially these were all lit, but as the year went on, they changed requirements, so it went to mostly natural light for the listings. Of course that’s a whole new workflow! I’ve been building up my product and still life portfolio as well, and aim to launch a dedicated commercial photography website in 2016.
I also took another step into changing my camera system. I received the Fuji X-T10 at the end of June, less than a fortnight after it was launched. I fell in love with it immediately. It was such a vast improvement from the X-Pro1. I love the X-Pro1, but the speed of focus, and the low light abilities left me wanting more. The X-T10 gave that more. I’m still using the Canon 5DIII for nightclub work, as the TTL flash system on Fuji is still weak. The majority of my work is done on the Fuji though. I’ll have more news on it next month too. As part of the move to Fuji, I’ve bought more lenses to round the system out. I also expanded on my use of the Godox v850 system, albeit as Neewer rebrands.
I’ve mentioned my book, but that’s not the only writing I’ve done this year. The Maximum Workflow column for Photoshop User Magazine has been a monthly staple for me. I also had the pleasure of meeting Ben Brain from Future Publishing at a Scott Kelby seminar, and this lead to a monthly Lightroom column with Digital Camera magazine. I’m still doing articles for Clarity magazine, though it’s not as frequent. I applied to write for Digital-Photography-School.com recently and got a writing trial. The article is out next week and talks about creating and shooting Orb photos.
So. Let’s look photos I loved from 2015! It’s a mix of everything, so not a specific genre of photos. There are a few editorials awaiting publication, so those images aren’t included.(click into the post for more)
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