My earliest memory of using a camera dates from around the age of five: entrusted with my parents' Zenit E and 35mm and 50mm prime lenses, a school trip to Chester zoo saw me taking photographs without guidance. Membership of the Young Ornithologists' Club (RSPB for kids) cemented the fascination with capturing nature on film.
I've always enjoyed landscape and cityscape photography. Buildings and architecture, mountains and seas: none of them move! The photographer has complete free-rein to bring the subject to life through lighting, composition and so forth. This also means the photographer has nobody to blame but themselves.
I feel that in 2010 I have probably reached a plateau with my landscape photography, though my architectural shots have improved (especially on my weekend in Edinburgh). In 2011 I shall have to invest in a landscape course to improve.
I tell a lie: I know exactly where it came from. It started with 2009's New Year Resolution to improve my self-esteem, went via the gym on my bicycle, involved a wonderful lady reminding me to take the brown paper bag off my head, and ended up in a catsuit. From there a photoshoot turned "boudoir" but without the right skills or photography vocabulary to express what I saw. And then I saw the advert...
Had you asked me at the start of the year which style of image I would shoot the most in the course of the year, I would not have thought portraiture. Far from it. I normally shoot buildings, bands, landscapes and wildlife. But 2010 was to become the year to improve at portraiture and "modelled" photography. From a journalistic day attached to the Green Party's campaigning in Manchester to street photography, this was the year of the face.
Just as with tone-mapping, panoramas are a relatively "technical" photograph, and I find my technical brain is relatively good at these kinds of pictures. As the year as progressed, I've tried some more ambitious and challenging panoramas, including HDR panoramas, the application of tone-mapping to MDR images, and polar coordinate panoramas ("planets").
The two big lessons learned: using a tripod helps hugely, and taking panoramas from a moving boat doesn't help achieve something seamless.
Tone-mapping either HDR or MDR source images is something I've found relatively easy, but my approach isn't to dial all the controls up to 11 and create something so busy with fussy detail that it hurts my eyes to look for too long. My use of tone-mapping this year has almost exclusively been to make an image which better represents what the human eye saw at the time. The eye adjusts its sensitivity depending on what it is looking at, while the camera has one exposure across the entire frame that might lose detail in shadows and highlights when displayed on a screen.
