Looking back.
It’s proving a bit of a mad dash for the finish line, but come December 31, 2012 I believe that the column count here for the year will be exactly 366. One a day, though if you go to the bottom of the page and click on ‘Archives’ you will see that August and September were dry months, so I have been in catch-up mode since. This has been a healthy thing to do as all of those ‘catch-up’ pieces had been swirling about in my noggin for quite a while so I am clearing the decks, so to speak.
I rambled back through the year and highlight below a few of the most enjoyable pieces, which I divide below into the three eponymous categories in the name of this journal. Photographs – my snaps, Photographers – about other workers in the field, and Photography – technical matters.
Photographs:
January 31 – The Abduction. This extraordinary ‘found image’, in the style of Marcel Duchamp almost, is so special that I would understand were you to accuse me of staging it. But no, that’s exactly how it was, waiting to be snapped on Osgood Place in lovely Jackson Square, San Francisco. It was so evocative that I took pen to paper and wrote a short story to go with it.
March 7 – The Nikkor 500mm f/8N AI Reflex lens is possibly one of Nikon’s most abused and ill-used optics. It is special in every way and I set out to show how to get the best out of it here. I was so irritated about the ineptness of users’ comments all over the web, reflecting nothing more than poor technique, that I really went to town on this one.
March 6 – A simple snap named Pachino brought with it a flood of imagination and memories, resulting in another short story to accompany the picture.
March 13 – Alcatraz was the destination for a day trip with my boy and it’s almost impossible to make bad pictures there, though I saw many giving it a good try.
March 24 – White Birches saw me reminiscing about my time with God. Seldom have I had so much fun writing a short story.
April 6 – Six in sixty and one-twenty saw a raw fecundity of output in two minutes with a very wide lens.
April 19 – A face at the window showed the benefits of carrying a light and inexpensive zoom along for the trip.
Photographers:
Feb 13 – Donald Jean shared his gorgeous Venetian photographs with readers. Thank you Donald for your outstanding photography.
March 21 – The NYT’s Lens blog did an arresting piece on 1950s images of dirigibles.
March 28 – Englishman Martin Parr cannot be accused of good taste, doing a number pretty much on anyone he photographs, with hard flash and poses which often ridicule. But this modern imitator of Wegee is worth a look.
April 22 – Photography in Mexico was an enthralling show at SF’s MOMA.
Photography:
January 2 – Fringale. At the conclusion of 2011 I made a commitment to share my dining places with readers who might be thinking of visiting the closest thing to Paris in America, San Francisco, a city I photograph weekly. Fringale was the first such in 2012, to be followed by many others.
January 15 – My Desk laid it all bare and disclosed the less than ordered work space in my home office. It doesn’t look much better today.
January 26 – Midnight in Paris is Woody Allen’s luminous tribute to the Paris of Gertrude Stein and nothing better was made for the cinema in 2012.
February 7 – Legacy Nikon lenses was a real Trojan Horse. Little did I suspect that this piece would take me on a tremendous odyssey of rediscovery of old MF Nikkors which I used in my youth, borrowed from my employer, Dixons, in the UK when I was still in short trousers. I ended the year owning all of the lenses in that piece and many more.
March 11 – The Nikon D700 and Geotagging was the tale of my determination to confer competent GPS data on my Nikon snaps. It proved successful and far lower cost and better designed than Nikon’s clunky solution.
March 17 – Adding a CPU to MF Nikkor lenses – Part II was the culmination of a massive technical exercise into ‘chipping’ old Nikkors. The benefits are huge, the costs minimal.
March 26 – ACR lens profiles saw me start publishing lens profiles for all the MF Nikkors I was acquiring. These have proved popular with old lens aficionados, looking to get the best out of their lenses.