As another year passes (very quickly in this year’s case) ,I always find it an interesting exercise to review what we have done in any aspect of life in the past year. Perhaps the most visible and tangible development we can see every day is how Charlotte continues to grow in stature and behaviour. Photography on the other hand does not necessarily grow in the same type of manner. It can take many detours to different genres, different styles and sometimes the acquisition of new knowledge can even lead to a backward step if not properly applied. For this reason, a constant review of past and current work can often be a helpful step to learn from both success and errors of judgement. These are some of our experiences from the year gone by.
January:
The year started off with a long weekend to Kangaroo Island. We were joined by Keith and Amy who had travelled from Hong Kong and were keen to photograph local landscapes with us. We had never met in person but we were glad that we embraced this opportunity and have formed a new friendship which we hope will lead to further outings! We also learned a few things about travelling with an infant since this was our first trip away with Charlotte. We also had to move out of home for extensive renovations. This proved a challenge as we had to ‘shift office’ for all of our post processing work. Gallery M hosted the last exhibition of our 2010/11 works. Our images were complimented greatly though sales were again quite meagre. All sales were of images depicting Australian scenes.
February:
Our next brief weekend away was to the state’s Limestone coast in the south east. The towns of Robe and Beachport were fantastic and truly idyllic places to stay. We did learn however that baby must win out when it comes to trying to photograph summer evenings which are often beyond bed time. A smashed polariser was the main casualty of this particular lesson.
March:
March saw a transition to wedding photography with our busiest month ever! We had three weddings booked with only 1-2 weeks in between. This was a real challenge for us not only for photographic reasons but for time management in between weddings in order to prepare proofs. We like to finish an entire wedding before moving on to the next but it was not quite possible with the consecutive weekend dates. The lesson we learned is that we won’t be doing any more than 2 weddings in a month. The weddings themselves however, were an absolute pleasure to photograph and Charlotte enjoyed spending time with grandparents from both sides of the family.
April -May
We spent most of our remaining spare time at the start of the month finalising plans to travel to New Zealand. One week before departure we photographed a wedding at Adelaide Oval in a rather historic state of demolition! Once we had finished Jillian and Sam’s wedding, we were glad to have finished our most busy wedding season to date with 8 weddings spanning back November 2011. Many of our lessons learned from the New Zealand trip have been detailed in previous blog posts, but I thought I’d reshare some favourite moments from the trip.
June:
Photographically, most of this month was spent post processing the images from New Zealand. I made a commitment to try some online videos regarding processing and will continue to try though the time requirement to create the videos just seems to be missing now that Charlotte’s bed time is extending later into the evening! Interspersed with the backlog of New Zealand landscapes, I did head out on a few occasions to some local favourite spots and ventured toward to some new locations too.
July:
After spending 30 years in the Adelaide region, it is interesting that we had never done what the vast majority of locals would consider a ‘way of life’ ; a trip ‘upriver’ to the Murray for a weekend short holiday. We decided to visit Mannum and found that it would probably be a recurring winter destination for us! Beautiful mists and a full river made it a pretty special place to visit. Towards the end of July, we were finally able to move back into our renovated home though much work still needed to be done.
August:
This was a time for local forays while planning a trip to Eyre Peninsula. The canola was in bloom from late August and this will likely be a yearly photographic task to find a different way to present the bright yellow fields. We realised that we had not travelled our own state nearly as much as we had been to other parts of Australia and the world. We had also noticed that in exhibitions, most of our work which has sold has been of local , familiar scenes. While people may ooh and aah over the surreal landscapes of Iceland, it lacks enough context for people to want to purchase the work as anything other than fine art. A lesser quality picture photographically which has more meaning is more likely to be the kind of image which sells well locally.
September:
We held our first privately arranged workshop! We have had many requests to run workshops both regarding field shooting as well as post processing. On a cold September morning, I headed out with 5 participants to Port Willunga for a dawn shoot before returning home for a 2 hour post processing session. After some initial IT issues, we settled down to some muffins and hot drinks to review and edit some images from the morning. Overall, it was an enjoyable learning experience for us and we hope the candidates enjoyed their time as well. We will try to fit a few workshops into the calendar for 2013 but at this stage, it’s looking quite busy already! In late September, Charlotte brought home some terribly destructive bugs from childcare which laid us flat for several consecutive weeks. It was time for another break.
October:
Our initial plan was to return to South Island in late 2012 to visit the North and West. Unfortunately, a lack of relievers at work meant that those plans had to be shelved. Things happen for a reason however, and we ended up visiting Eyre Peninsula instead. The 10 days we spent there made us realise that we don’t need to travel far to witness wild and dramatic landscapes. The rugged coastlines, dunes, granite rock formations and hospitality were all features of our holiday. During that trip, the childcare bugs were cleansed from our system and we eventually remembered what it felt like to be healthy again!
November:
This was a quiet month photographically with the first of our four weddings for the season. We made a commitment to develop a new website to allow for easier purchasing of prints and a cleaner interface. After some research, zenfolio seemed to suit our needs the most. We have since diverted www.everlookphotography.com to this new site , though all of the old images are still viewable at www.everlook.smugmug.com . We also attempted to clear our backlog of ex-exhibition prints but due to many factors including a decided lack of advertising, we only sold a handful. Don’t worry, it means that next year the sale will be even bigger! Around this time of year, I tend to also go hunting for hay bale images.
December:
The month of December commenced with receiving results from the International Loupe Awards. Marianne’s gold image was placed 5th in the amateur landscapes category. The rest of our images scored 7 silver awards and 4 bronze awards. We were very excited that all of our images entered received an award of some sort. 2012 was a quieter year than 2011 for print publications. We had images printed in SA life for Alice & Matt’s wedding from 2011, a feature spread in Digital Photo UK magazine and an image of Melbourne street art in ‘Destinations’ magazine. Our online successes from the past year include several features from facebook based pages (The Universe, Megashot, Professional Photographer’s page, I f**cking love science) as well as feature articles on Photoblogger.net , HDR one magazine, and PhotoBotos.com. Our 500px and flickr pages continue to roll along and some time early in 2013, the flickr page will tick over the 1,000,000 views! Over all, other life matters such as raising a child and arranging the reconstruction of our home have clouded our ability to reflect. Now that I have taken the time to do so, what felt like a year that just rapidly passed by almost without notice, was actually a year we can take great pride and encouragement from.
To end on an important note, we spent a morning photographing a the most local scene possible – our street! Every year for 1-2 weeks the Jacaranda trees brighten up the streets and we decided to let Charlotte roam amongst the fallen flowers. It brings us such joy to watch our little girl display unrestrained emotion without feeling a need to hold back. On this last note, we look forward to family and photographically friendly 2013! Some planned destinations for work , conference and fun include New Zealand, Sydney, Merredin (Western Australia), Seattle and the Pacific Northwest of the USA.
– Have yourselves a restful holiday season and cheers to all of your 2013’s 🙂
Everlook Photography 