The past few months have been quite hectic, leaving one office in Kenya on Friday, to resume duty in Nepal the week after. Moving, getting to know the city, adjusting to a new role at work, settling in, … and basically not having taken the time to pick up my camera, leave along do some serious nature and wildlife photography, …
Don’t get me wrong here, the photographic opportunities in Nepal are endless and I will not refrain from picturing a great scene or a genuine person such as Gauri Devi Bhatt and her son in the remote Dadeldhura district in Far Western Nepal.
It still being January, I allow myself to reflect a little on 2012. It has been quite a ride, with a Wild Eye competition mention, a picture on 1x (which also made it into their limited edition yearbook No Words), getting some good air in online Newspaper articles as well as Belgian print versions and getting a shot into the high level Geographic Expeditions catalog. In short, nice things happening (you can check out the concerned shots on my newly created Awards page), yet even more things to improve upon. With Ronja joining our ranks, I havn’t been out in the field as much as I would have liked, nevertheless, besides my non photography related day job, I am enjoying photography through the NYIP course, with now 2 out of the 6 units finalized. I just submitted my projects, consisting of 6 photo assignments (only prints are accepted, which is really nice thing, since it forces you to go the extra mile in delivering a finalized product):
using shutter speed to express a sense of motion/speed by panning, stopping the action or using a slow shutter speed to capture motion in your frame;
use selctive focus to make the subject stand out;
create a feeling of distance by using a great DoF;
emphasize a sbuject by its size and off center placement;
use framing to focus attention on your subject;
use leading lines to draw attention to your subject.
Meanwhile, you may have noticed I finally found a way that works for me in creating nice looking galleries in my WordPress blog, being the NextGen galleries whom blow me away for their actual simplicity amongst a whole bunch of way less user friendly plugins which do the same thing, only worse and without nice widgets, such as the random shots you can see to the right of this post now. And I can tell you that I’ve been trying quite a few of them over the past few months, none of them pleasing me, finally I found something that did please me. Have a look here, I would be happy getting your opinion.
Leaving you with one of my personal 2012 favorites.
Canon 7D, Canon 300mm f/4 L IS USM, 1/8000, f/4, ISO 800
As for 2013: it promises to be quite a ride for us, yet more about that in my next blog post, which will be up later this week, along with a first guest post for the year (one which I’m really excited about), so keep an eye on this space and my related social media, you can find the relevant links on the right of this screen.
For now, HAVE A FANTASTIC 2013, GREAT LIGHT and PLEASURE in doing what you do!!!
