Balaji’s Blog

A year of living comfortably – 2007 in photos

It is with a sense of disappointment that I draw the curtain on my collection of photos for 2007. There were a few “a-ha” moments during that time, but more overwhelming is the sense that I didn’t do much in pursuit of this art.

A simple look at the numbers says it all – My 2006 collection contains a staggering 294 photos, posted in approximately 230 days, starting in late September ‘06 and ending in May 2007.

My 2007 collection contains an anaemic 58 photos. The kicker? I took 226 days to post that number, a glacial pace of 1.8 photos a week (the daily number is just too pitifully low to talk about).

Now, it is often said that in photography volume is no measure of quality. I could offer that statement to defend the lack of effort I’ve put into my photography.

More practically, I could tell you that in May 2007 I moved from an apartment near the Lower Seletar Reservoir to an apartment right in the concrete heart of Yishun. It is true that the loss of my muse affected me deeply. Not having a ever-changing subject close at hand every day definitely dulls the desire to take out the camera and go hunting.

I could always fall back on the old standby – work was a killer this year. That would be somewhat true as well.

Truth be told, none of those really explains why I have almost no photographic output to speak of. The reality is that I used a mixture of all those reasons to stay within a zone where I felt I had some idea of what the final result would look like.

So, yet more photographs of buildings and shots taken in the dawn hours¹. I worry that the ability to shoot portraits or just street-shooting has simply withered away under this onslaught.

What then does 2008 hold? A few points are worth talking about:

#1: To establish my geek cred, I will begin by talking about my photographic workflow. For most of 2006 and 2007, I really didn’t have a workflow. Despite access to an extremely powerful photo management software, I spent a lot of time organizing my photos manually. Now that I’ve run of photos to actually go through, I spent some time thinking about how to speed up organizing and editing my photos and came up with a workflow that hopefully is a lot more organized.

First, I decided to switch to Adobe Lightroom – being able to organize my photos and do most of my processing in the same application should help speed up things.

I also spent a fair bit of time looking over how I organize my photos on Flickr and the keywords I set up in Iview. I then split them up into distinct sets of information and will be exclusively organizing my photos this way. Lightroom will take care of where the photos actually live.

#2: In contrast to the constant travelling that characterized 2005, I spent almost the whole of 2006 and 2007 right here in Singapore. Now I like this place a lot, but nothing quite gets the photographic eye working like something new (my Macau trip is proof of that – a fifth of the photos I posted in 2007 came from that 2 day trip). I expect to travelling again in 2008 to a couple of countries and even if it’s just buildings and hotel rooms, hey atleast it’ll be new buildings and hotel rooms.

#3: As much as I love the portability of my current camera and have been amazed by what it can do, there’s a lot missing in it – manual control of aperture and shutter speeds, optical stabilization, better high ISO performance, RAW shooting; the list could go on. I’ve been talking about buying a new camera for years now but if a few things on the personal front come together, maybe this year will be it (and I’ve probably jinxed it by saying that – oh well).²

So there you have it – my very short look back on the year that was and an ever shorter look ahead. I would say watch this space, but that would just be cruel and unusual punishment

1. which really is no place for a Point-n-Shoot camera like mine [↩]
2. In case you are wondering why I want a super-zoom like the S5 instead of a dSLR, that’s a blog post that’s yet to be written [↩]

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 20th, 2008 at 6:22 pm and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.