November 2012

Late November marks the onset of the Season of Nostalgia -- books of the year lists have already been and gone -- so I thought I'd look back a year to see what I was about in November 2012.  It's easy to forget how long, subjectively, a year is, though as a friend said recently it wasn't so much the years as the decades he was losing track of. I know what he means; whatever did happen to the 1990s?

Naturally, I looked at my photographic backfiles, which I keep in directories sorted primarily by month, then year, which makes comparison easy.  Now, I think there has never been a month when I have processed from RAW more than 60% of the photographs I took, and the average is probably closer to 25%.  This means it is always rewarding to go back, periodically, to root out any overlooked images.  As I have often said, one's reactive eyes are often way ahead of one's conscious, reflective mind.  It may take a year or more to see what you saw.

It seems that last November I was mainly interested in hard-edged, contrasty, semi-abstract compositions, with quite pure colours, so typically was producing pictures like this:

Valley Garden, November 2012

This meant that quite a few softer, lower-impact images got passed over.  I found I liked these two, previously unprocessed images, variations on two very familiar views:

St. Catherine's Hill, November 2012

Car-park allotment, November 2012

My processing technique has evolved, and so has my approach.  More and more, I'm stepping back and seeing the whole view, rather than diving in and looking for telling details.  I'm also interested in a different, more subtle palette of colours. No doubt this says as much about about my stage of life as my changing tastes. I wonder what I've recorded but overlooked this year?