Interestingly, by being able to follow - through the treads an posts in this forum - the whole development of free image editing software and exchanges on various topics, I have learned so much about many aspects of digital image editing that I could never have learned anywhere else.
It’s almost like a free college course on the subject. Invaluable.
If you then put this knowledge into practice with tools that are freely available here, you no longer have to be afraid to be ashamed of the results.
On the contrary, the nice side effect is that it makes you immune to doubts that you will deliver bad work because you don’t use commercial tools that are considered the standard for so-called “professional” work.
2022 was a rather poor year for me in terms of photgraphy. I didn’t take many photos, and the photos I did take were often quite plain. This Biriyani Cake was photographed for my mother’s recipe blog towards the end of the year and is my favourite because I visualised the image I wished to create, and came pretty close to achieving what I aimed for. I didn’t want a typical biriyani-on-a-plate photo and this was supposed to be a special dish for Christmas so I came up with the idea of a biriyani cake. It took a surprising amount of work to accomplish this photo, including ironing the blue cloth I used as a background. I managed to get the background lights arranged properly and the right perspective towards the end of the shoot, which resulted in the egg sinking a bit into the rice but I am otherwise very pleased with this image.
For me it should be this one, mostly because it was taken with a old and neglected Zeiss Ikonta that l cleaned and fixed, and that it was one of the first roll of film l developed at home. It was quite satisfying to get a sharp and properly exposed shot and process it from start to finish (with RT).
So… I have imported about 60k photos this year in DT. That is, because I migrated my collection from LR and finally made the switch. And I’m very happy that I did!
After some years of taking only family pictures I upgraded my dusty EOS50D in Nov and got out to take some (mostly nature) pictures. In the last months I learned so much about proper raw development - it’s unbelievable, that I missed all this in the years before.
I’m very grateful for all the effort, that people put into this forum and also into YT videos.
I realized, that I haven’t got so many great shots over the last year, but while browsing the latest images, this one stuck. I took this photo at my parents, while being there for a few days. It was nearly dark and the quality evidently isn’t great. Anyways here is my image.
Using my cameras, I have accumulated about 2000 shots the past year (I shot more, but some have already been culled – I’m way behind with my processing). We did not go on so many trips, and I was often just lazy to take a camera – took many shots with my phone.
This one is from my little LX7, which I really should be taking more with me. Nothing special, just a nice walk in the spring.
I just checked my 2022 folder and I have around 35k raw files. Most are bursts from shooting wildlife and the like. Because of such a high cadence whenever I came home I became overwhelmed with so many photos and never got to rating and culling… Only edited a few that jumped straight out in quality and then left it to gather dust. Definitely need to break out of this cycle in 2023. Both for mine and my hard drives’ sanity
My favorite shot, or at least the one that was more on my mind: