Thanks to Martin Bailey and his recent podcast I have been more disciplined this year in reviewing my work of the last 12 months. As a result I can present below my top ten photographs of 2017.
In the selection process I found that my Lightroom catalog shows a 40% lower number of photographs for 2017 than for the previous year. However, to me it doesn’t feel like I have missed out on opportunities as the baseline number of candidates for the top ten selection process was about the same as in 2016. I tend to attribute this higher keeper rate to the challenge of one camera – one lens that I have accepted for almost all of the year. Consequently, 8 of final 10 images have been taken with just this one camera/lens combination.
The Fuji X100F with its 35mm equivalent field of view and the leaf shutter has also brought another change: while I had already included traces of people in my photographs in previous years, there are now more and more actual people in the scenes, and I am getting closer to them when making the image. Still this is far from where I want to be, but I am happy to see this develeopment over the past months.
B&W is also taking a larger space among my photographs now, and the 50/50 split among the final top ten is a good representation of how I currently work. Today I chose colour only if it adds information to the black and white version. This rule that I have put in place for myself has certainly contributed to my learning process this year.
Finally, in 2017 I have experimented more with different image formats, and I am happy to see that the top ten are reflecting this.
Thank you for having a look at the images. Feel free to leave a comment as your input to my development.