Dark streets and Dawson

I've had a few people comment with their ideas for image of the year, thank you very much. Now that I've got all my images on one drive it's much more convenient to review, and so I've been doing. Who knows what's going to show up in the next while?

There's a lot of photos to go through, almost 28000 for 2017 alone, with just under 1800 actually edited. Of those, I've assigned 4 or 5 star ratings to 191 photos. That comes out to one photo every 150 or so that I think is a bit beyond my ordinary. About a dozen make me go wow and get 5 stars. I could go on a quest to take more photos, doing things just the way I do now. Every 150 or so should be a winner.

Or, I could get better at taking photos. That's the route I'm trying to take, thinking about all the photos I see. Why do I like them? Where are my eyes going, and why? What would I have shot if I was standing there, and why? When I'm out in a group I usually spend a bit of time watching the others, trying to see what is catching their eye and how they go about capturing it.

I especially like looking at work by pro photographers. Even without editing tricks, and discounting long daytime exposures via filters, the pros consistently get better shots. There's generic advice of course. It's not like there is some secret to all this. The trick is to do your research to be in the right place (inches matter sometimes) at the right time for the right light with the right camera settings for the shot you want, and apply everything you know to get it in camera. Then comes editing and that's a whole other game.

It's kind of fun to go back through old photos and see what I've done with them. Some are overlooked gems that were never edited for whatever reason. Some have star ratings that I no longer agree with. A few times I've winced at the edit job and know I could do better now.

These are from the evening photo ramble in Inglewood a week or so ago. I love the mystery of dark streets. My writer's imagination starts working, wondering if one of my characters is lurking just down the way. (And some of them are lurkers, all right.) Wondering if something or someone interesting is in the shadows. Wondering what could happen.

Here's a panorama of Dawson City. I'd always meant to put this together and never did. This is where we got those super aurora shots on the last night of our trip.

Same viewpoint, looking a little further along the river.

One of the evenings I was out doing some city night shots, and want to take another look at those. Plus the bazillion aurora shots I've been meaning to revisit.

I found a few other undeveloped Dempster photos and will be sharing them along the way. It's been 3 months, and I still get chills looking at some of the photos. That trip was certainly event of the year.