2020 in Review
This year was another great year! Well… Kinda. A lot of stuff went down in 2020. I won’t discuss that here. Anyway, day one, I took a photo that ended up placing 3rd in a worldwide photography contest. The photo is of a bold jumping spider on the underside of a dandelion. Jumping spiders and dandelions are some of my favorite subjects because they are all over the place during the warmer months.
I learned a lot about bouncing and manipulating light, and using my flash in better ways. I acquired some studio gear – softboxes, backdrops, RGB light panels, and more. This helped me improve significantly in the indoor portraits and creative categories.
I also realized that my macros were just not up to my standards. I did my research and decided I needed a diffuser. I made a really bootleg flash diffuser. It was ugly, but it got the job done until I could find a more elegant solution. My macros became sharper and brighter over the coming months because of this.
I ran into a problem this year – I either took so many photos that the counter reset or I did something to reset it. What this means is that after photo DSC09999 it reset back to DSC00001. Not a huge deal, except that I like to put them on my phone to share on Instagram. So, with the counter reset, there are no longer unique names on the photos and some were being overwritten. Again, not a huge deal, but an inconvenience at times. To resolve this, I wrote my first piece of useful software and I use it all the time. It’s simple. I use it to prepend the date (or a custom string) to photos, so they are always unique (unless I take more than ten-thousand photos in a day 😆).
I found several new and fun places around Milledgeville to take photos and my skills as a photographer grew significantly and rapidly this year.
