This was incredibly hard to do. Sarah asked me what my top ten pictures were and I felt compelled to figure it out. But here they are in chronological order:

Bunny Goes Flying (7/18/07) – This is probably my favorite picture of them all. I was sitting in the copilot seat of a friend’s Bonanza flying to LA and noticed my shadow on the wing. There wasn’t any question what had to be done, and I started shooting. Gary never questioned what was going on next to him.

Bolex Camera (7/24/07) – If I shot this today I’d get rid of the bright white blown out floor, but I love the image anyways. The picture is a tribute to my dad and the first movie camera I used as a kid, so there’s personal emotions built into this one. Plus I think it’s just purdy.

Windmill (9/21/07) – This image got panned by a judge in a competition I entered it in because it broke the rule of thirds and is totally symmetrical, which is exactly why I took it and why I love it. I use this as my desktop image on my laptop.

Tumbling Dice (12/14/07) – You might think I got lucky to get boxcars on this roll, but I took hundreds of photos to get this one. Just playin’ the odds. I’m especially proud of this because it didn’t use any fancy equipment. Just a flashlight and the built in flash on my camera. This is one of my most popular pictures on flickr.

Game Over (3/25/08) – Lacrosse is a great game to watch, and a lot of fun to photograph. I learned a lot about action photography at Kevin’s games, but this is my favorite lacrosse picture by a wide margin. I like that one of the players is off to the side, the low sun, the vivid colors, and especially the wide crop. I got a 14″ wide print and matted and framed it for Kevin’s room and it looks great.

Magic Hour Stairway (4/10/08) – Taken in the hour before sunset on Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay. I love the color and composition and the amount of detail that came out. I was using a Canon 40D that I rented for a shoot I was doing for a friend – it went on my wish list that day. That was a great time to be roaming around a decommissioned naval base, I felt like I couldn’t shoot fast enough to get all the shots that were possible there.

Student Team Photos (5/7/08) – There’s a lot I like about this (composite) photo. First off, it’s all my students so that makes it awesome right there. Second, all my studying of lighting paid off. This was shot with a single strobe bounced off the wall to give a softer light, and a long exposure to get the powerpoint slides on the screens. Third, to get them and the screen image in the same shot I had to use this really low camera angle (I was lying on the floor) and I needed them to lean into the camera to get their faces from shrinking – this ended up creating a really fun pose that brings out a lot of their personalities.

Golden Contentment (6/17/08) – This one was a tough call. Shane was my favorite subject and I had a lot of images of him to choose from. Laying on the lawn with tennis balls, sticking his head out the car window, puffy hair after a bath… he’s a star. This image was from a really fun day we had on the lake, and it says a lot to me about what a special dog he is.

Kite’s View of Mt. Tallac Peak (6/24/08) – After 14 years of going to Stanford Sierra Camp, I finally did the hike to the top of Tallac. I planned this one months ahead of time and bought a kite aerial photography kit and learned how to use it, all with the hope that the wind would be right up there to get this shot. I felt great about doing the hike, and being able to get the shot was a giant thrill for me. I beamed about this one for days and still brag about it to anyone who will listen.

The End (7/7/08) – If my last photo of the project wasn’t on my top ten list I would feel like I failed. I tried to apply a lot of what I’ve learned to this shot both in technique and in storytelling. And it made the list.

I just dug through Lightroom and pulled out some numbers that I thought were interesting about my last twelve months of photography.

From 7/9/07 through 7/8/08 I shot over 22,000 photos (averaging about 57 a day). I didn’t track my time (thank God), but a conservative estimate would be that I averaged at least a couple of hours a day between shooting, processing and uploading pictures. So this was probably a 800 to 1000 hour project. Please note – I tried to do more than take snapshots here!

Most of the pictures (about 70%) were with my trusty Canon 10D before I dropped it down the stairs. Another 13% were with the new replacement Canon 40D. 15% were with my Olympus waterproof point-and-shoot, and the remaining few were from my phone, a flatbed scanner or screenshots.

I got my Canon 100mm f/2.8 Macro for Christmas, and shot over 4,000 photos with it. Not all of those are macros, it’s a great portrait lens, too. I also shot about 4,000 photos with my super-wide Tamron 11-18mm lens. The rest of the shots on my 10D were with a Canon 28-200mm lens (which I didn’t like, but was still sad when it broke into three pieces at the bottom of the stairs).

About halfway through the project I saw the light and started shooting everything in RAW format (rather than jpeg). My files are huge, but I have the original unprocessed data and have tons of latitude for adjusting color, exposure, sharpness, etc. in post. Total storage for all my pictures is about 100GB (33GB from last year, 67GB from this year) – well beyond my patience for burning them to DVDs, so they’re backed up on multiple disks. (I only delete really awful shots.)

My #1 source for inspiration was flickr. I know, it’s supposed to be books of photos by the masters, but hey. I also learned a ton about lighting from strobist.com, which I would say is mandatory for anyone serious about photography. I did a lot of the exercises and shared work in the strobist group on flickr.

I joined the Palo Alto Camera Club last August, and really appreciate the face to face interactions around sharing and critiquing work. I did a number of photo-field trips with PACC, and also did one with a group of local flickr fanatics (I’m planning to do more of these, too).

Photo books were very helpful, the best two being “Light: Magic and Science” by Hunter, Biver and Fuqua, and “The Moment It Clicks” by Joe McNally. I learned an enormous amount from both of these and they definitely made my pictures better.

One year ago today I took on a “Picture A Day” project with the goal of shooting 366 (leap year!) reasonably good pictures and posting them for the world to see.

On Monday I finished that project, and never missed a shot.
First to last…

Along the way I acquired new equipment, flew a kite with a camera hanging from it on a 9700′ peak, went underwater, did a self-portrait while wakeboarding, got kicked out of five different places, broke a Canon 10D, froze time, stretched time, went to places I never would have gone, shot pictures for a movie, got a few accolades, met tons of new people, became addicted to Flickr, learned how to light, and ended up a much better photographer.

The results are on flickr and also on my apadblog.

Before that project I was an occasional blogger (just look at the history here), but I ended up doing a post a day on apadblog, sometimes about the photos and sometimes about the circumstances around the photos. I’m now moving back over to this blog and will continue with that style. This week I’m going to be talking a lot about some of the experiences I had and lessons I learned (intermingled with a few new photos).