January Image of the Month

Another year of Image of the Month to look forward to, if I make it. My intent is to continue, but sometimes life has other plans. We'll see.

I was thinking about where film photos should be placed. Normally only photos taken and edited within the month are in the running for IOTM. There was one Image of the Year that hadn't been an Image of the Month because I hadn't assembled the panorama till after I got home. That's why all the images go back into the hat for IOTY. 

But now I see some images scanned from film, and life being what it is, it might take several months to actually shoot a whole roll of film. Then there's development time. So once scanned, I considered the question, when do photos taken in one month, but developed and scanned in the next month (or the month after...) get considered for IOTM? I dither enough about image selections; I don't want to go back and redo several months of IOTM blogs.

As it turns out, the film version of October's runner up IOTM turned up in January. Does that film version of that image get a chance to be IOTM? It's certainly one of the stronger images. After musing about it for a while, I've decided that the typical time delay between taking a film image, and seeing the scanned result, should not prevent me from considering a photo for IOTM. I'm going to consider the date the scanned version was imported into Lightroom to be the 'official' date. It will be a red letter day for me if a film shot turns out to be IOTM, and I'll certainly tell the story when it happens. 

As I look over the 119 images under consideration, I'm thinking it was a month of 3.5's. There seemed to be a bunch of images that were more than routine shots of something, and yet not quite something to get really worked up about. None the less, there are a few images that I'm quite pleased with.

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Second Runner Up

Chosen mainly because I saw the shot, walked to the right place to get it, and got the settings right. Not falling into the river, or slipping on the ice was a nice bonus. It would have been an even better photo had I removed the spots on the lens first. Trying to remove them in Lightroom just made a mess. It used to be that you could select where the spot removal replacement was selected from. 

First Runner Up

I went back into this image later in the month to see if I could remove the wires on the right, and the pole peeking out between two of the wheels. Not. Sean had suggested some editing tweaks but they had already been done to the max and trying to push further detracted from the image. At least I think so. Taken during a film ramble with friends in Inglewood.

Image of the Month

Frost patterns can be beautiful, and even more so when the colour is tweaked to make someone happy.