Favourite pictures of 2009

I thought it might be a good chance to do some self-reflection, so I went through my pictures of 2009 and selected my favourite photographs.

Quite a task to go through all pictures of a year. About 2500 in my case. I guess that is not a lot of pictures for someone who hopes for some kind of improvement in his skills as a photographer. But, it was easier for me selecting those 16 pictures of 2009, than it is for me to select a dozen pictures of a vacation trip. It might be the totally different approach. In travel pictures I always look for the complete documentation, here I just looked for the pictures I like the most.

Postprocessing consisted mostly of touching the curves and optimizing the clipping. I removed some dirt on the picture with the cat in the window.

The photo of the person with the umbrella and the dog on the way is my favourite picture of 2009. Funny that two pictures with red umbrellas made it into this compilation.

Well, always look for the red - one rule of photograpy I read more than once. What else can I learn from the 16 pictures? Simplify and and isolate your photographic objects. That is probably most important. Only the picture of the red umbrella on the roof was shot with a focal length of 280mm, the rest was more or less shot with a standard focal length. Camera is the TZ5.

Feedback on the pictures is welcome.

Flora and Fauna of 2009

I found quite some mountain flowers among this year's pictures. Here is a selection of them. All of them have been made while hiking in the bavarian/austrian alps. Sometimes the focus failed, which was tough to make out live on the display while shooting. DSLR here I come. When I prepared the pictures and had to name them I was kind of shocked as I had no idea what kind of flowers I had in front of me. Check out the file-names in the source and have laugh.

I thought it would be fun to find all the different animals I shot in 2009. I had to look really hard to find 16 different animals to stay in the pattern. That was the absolute limit. Flowerwise I had to pick the better images, animals I had to take anything - even dead or bad pictures (no, I found another picture, that of a roadkilled mouse). Can you identify all kinds of them?

This is probably a field, where a bright and fast, long focal length would be nice. Except for four pictures all of the pictures have again been shot during some mountain-trip.

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