Wrapping Up 2020

Well, here we are, 2020 is over (thank goodness). I’ve got three more images to share for clondon’s 52 weeks challenge, though, so here goes!

Week 32 – Artificial Light

This is one of the older ones that I missed, entitled “artificial light”. Chelsea says,

Now I know not everyone has studio lights or even an on camera flash. But guess what, artificial light is any light that isn’t natural. That could be your desk lamp, the neons of your local bodega, street lights, anything that isn’t that fiery ball of gas in the sky. For this challenge I’d like you to focus on artificial light you can have some control over, however. 

This is not a terribly imaginative photo, but I kinda like it nonetheless.

Week 50 – Raghu Rai

This was one of the weeks that I really wanted to make sure I did, I’ve loved all the photographer spotlight weeks, and the idea of doing a diptych was really cool to me. For this challenge, Chelsea says,

Known for his extensive coverage of India, Raghu Rai mastered both color and black and white, a feat not achieved by many photographers. 

This week is a bit of a cheat as I want to see a diptych (re: two images which support each other) – one in color and one in black and white. The images should play off each other, but do not need to be of the same scene. They are cousins, not siblings.

Despite being excited for the topic, it took me a while to figure out what to photograph; but last week I ended up baking 12 (!) loaves of bread and it finally hit me:

Week 52 – Lesson Learnt

This is a bit of a silly one. I think I did learn a bunch of different lessons over the last year, including how to use my flash better (how to do blackout flash, how to do rear curtain sync), a bunch of cool stuff about other photographers, and also just how much work it takes to keep posting photos throughout the year. But, the one I decided to focus on for this post is “how ugly it is to take pictures on oak wood flooring”:

I ended up with a few different shots that I tried to use our oak flooring as a backdrop for, and I disliked all of them (example 1, example 2). The floors look really nice in person, and even as a part or element of a photo, but when they’re the sole background it just looks bad. There’s too much yellow in the floor and it’s really overwhelming. So I tried really hard for the second half of the challenge to find better backgrounds for my images.

Wrapping Up

And that’s that! There are three weeks that I never posted anything for: Week 19 (show context), Week 27 (re-evaluating goals), and Week 40 (figurative). At several points in the year I went back to week 19, and just could not ever figure anything out for it; it seemed pretty silly to do a shot for re-evaluating goals after the fact; and I think basically everyone agreed that week 40 was just really hard.

Instead of trying to continue to come up with stuff for last year, I’m going to relegate the ones I missed to the great burning dumpster fire in the sky and focus on 2021. I am planning to continue this challenge in 2021, so you should all still see semi-regular posts from me this year; I’m also really hoping to be able to share some of my non-challenge-related work this year as well. I did some of that this year, but not as much as I’d like. So we’ll see how it goes.

Anyways, thanks for reading, and I’ll see you soon!