My 2013 Photographic Summary and Lessons Learned

Blue Swallow Motel on Route 66, Tucumcari, New Mexico

At the beginning of each new year, I find it beneficial to go back and look at what I have accomplished photographically during the past 12 months.  I like to look at several aspects of my photography including individual images to see which succeeded and which failed.  I try to determine why individual images succeeded or failed and I try to learn from that experience and improve my photography.  In my mind, I'll never be good enough, skilled enough or successful enough.  I feel I can always do better.  In my opinion, it is a dangerous attitude to adopt in feeling as though you have reached the pinnacle of your abilities and can't learn more.

Here are some of the things I learned from looking at my 2013 photographic efforts.

Number of Images I made almost 13,000 images.  I'm not a prolific shooter, by any means, as I hear and read of photographers making thousands of images at one event.  I consider myself a moderate shooter.  For these many years using film, I was a rather conservative photographer as film, chemicals and paper were expensive. Pixels are not free, of course, but once you acquire your gear, the cost of photography goes way down.

Of those 13,000 here is the breakdown of when I was active.  The months with the most number of images are the months where I either was traveling, wandering and exploring or there was a significant event. Nothing unusual from these stats except I probably need to get out and photograph/practice more while I'm at home and not wait for a trip or something to photograph.

January        1460
February          73
March            241
April             2871
May              3283
June                160
July                 457
August            609
September      126
October        1639
November     1138
December       723

Additionally, here are the primary tools I used to make those images and the number of images made with each. Not surprisingly, the number of images made are pretty much split 50/50 between full frame and M4/3 as I have been heavily exploring the M4/3 format during the last year to see if it can fully replace my FF SLRs.

Nikon D800E     4825
Olympus E-M5   4440
Nikon D700       1034
Olympus E-M1    129 (purchased 12/2013)
Misc. cameras    2352  (point and shoot cameras used primarily for family events such as birthdays, as well as some scanned images from film, etc.)

When it comes to examining which focal lengths I used most, I found something interesting.  The ratio of use of a particular focal length did not necessarily translate equally across formats.  With full frame cameras, I primarily used wide angle lenses but with M4/3 it is pretty much split across the spectrum.  Do I see differently when using different formats?  Is the subject matter different for different formats?  Is the lighting different?  Something I need to think about.

D800E/D700 Top 6 focal lengths used with their percentage of use:

16mm     16.18%
24mm     13.00%
28mm     23.04%
35mm     21.16%
50mm     15.76%
70mm     10.83%

Olympus E-M5 Top 7 focal lengths (35mm equivalent) used with their percentage of use (I had acquired the E-M1 in December, but I am not counting images made with that camera as I was pretty much just out testing and getting used to it versus the E-M5):

16mm       1.87%
24mm       9.16%
28mm     33.10%
35mm     13.19%
40mm     13.51%  (single focal length lens only in M4/3 format)
50mm     12.84%
70mm     16.30%

As I continue to downsize the size and weight of my gear, I have seriously considered buying a very wide angle prime in the range of 20mm (smaller/lighter) rather than a very wide angle zoom (much bigger/heavier). Knowing how much I have used focal lengths wider than 20mm, will allow me to judge how that change could affect my future image making.

As far as predominant apertures used, F/5.6 and F/8 were by far the two most used apertures.  That isn't surprising as, primarily being a landscape photographer and spending time determining the sharpest apertures using FoCal software, I consciously chose to use each lens' sharpest apertures when that would suit the needed depth of field for the scene.  That being said, I also made images from F/1.4 to F/16 with various lenses.

When examining my favorite images for 2013, and excepting ones I made of my granddaughters, I found many.  I will craft a future post of my favorite 5 images from 2013.  There is nothing atypical about them. Most of them are uncomplicated, subtle in color, graphical and pleasing to the eye.  They all nicely fit my style.  One is at the top of this post.

What did I learn?  Several things among them that my failures were mostly my fault.  Very few problems with correct exposures.  Almost no issues with sharp focus.  Sometimes my timing was a bit off when photographing quickly moving subjects.  I need to practice more.  Composition was off in some images, but I usually work a scene pretty well and have several compositions from which to choose.  Probably the thing that I need to remember better is to change my camera settings back to my "standard" settings right after I change them to something else for a specific shot.  I had a few imagess where I had an unnecessarily high ISO that was not needed.  The result is a bit of a degraded image quality.  A normal viewer wouldn't notice it, but I do.

The most frequent self-criticism is that I found many images just not really interesting.  They were more of a "I was here" nature rather than something that will make you stop and really look at them.  They seemed interesting at the time, I suspect, because the location was somewhere at which I had never been or I was caught up in the emotion of the time and just made images.  Not that that is a bad thing.  I think part of our life experiences and memories is making images just to remind us of where we have been and what we have seen and done.

Thanks for looking.  Enjoy!

Dennis Mook

Many of my images can be found at www.dennismook.com.  Please pay it a visit.  I add new images regularly.  Thank you.


All content on this blog is © 2014 Dennis A. Mook.  All Rights Reserved.  Feel free to point to this blog from your website with full attribution.  Permission may be granted for commercial use.  Please contact Mr. Mook to discuss permission to reproduce the blog posts and/or images.