A house decorated for Christmas with lights and a huge candy cane
We took advantage of it not raining last night to go out and see some of the more decorated houses around the Olympia area. It is a tradition that the wife and I have been doing for at least 10 years now. This particular house is in Olympia and they really do a great job with it. This years focal point was a huge candy cane in the yard.
Here we are at that time of the year when a lot of photographers start looking back on the year and sharing their favorite images from the last 365 days. I am no different, I enjoy looking back and have been doing so for a couple years now, click on one of these two links to see my 2012 and 2013 collections. I typically break my annual look back into a number of categories, but for my favorites from 2014 I am only going to break them down to three, one of which will be very generic, and like last year I will save my favorite image of the year until the very end of the post.
Most of the images in this post can be viewed in larger versions by simply clicking on the image itself. I hope that you will take a few minutes to look over this collection of images and I hope you enjoy them.
If I am going to be completely honest, 2014 wasn’t really a very good year for us, I won’t go into details as they are not really important here, but because of that I did’t really get out and shoot as much as I normally do. My Lightroom catalog has just about half the number of RAW images for 2014 as it did in 2013. With that said, I did get out on a few different field trips with the Olympia Camera Club. The OCC is the oldest camera club in the Puget Sound area and I have become a lot more active with the club over the past year. The club tries to go on at least one group field trip each month and the following images, in no particular order, are from some of the trips in 2014.
A woman looks at a bird that can no longer fly
A memember of the Olympia Camera club making an image of the fresnel light at the Point Robinson Lighthouse on Vashon Island
Black and white image of a photographer making an image of the Ocean on the Washington Coast
A surfer at Cape Disappointment State Park in Southwest Washington State
Ok, this next group of five images might seem like they are all over the place when it comes to subject matter and you would be right, they are. :-)
An abstract image of 2 carnival rides at the Washington State Fair
Seattle, the Emerald City, at night.
Woman enjoying a cup of coffee in solitude overlooking the Pacific Ocean
Fireworks during the annual 3rd of July celebration at Boston Harbor near Olympia, WA
An old tree and a sunset near Tucson AZ
As always, no look back would be complete without a few weather images. This years selection of 4 images all came from the same storm chasing trip to northern Arizona with Bryan Snider and Chris Frailey. Not only that, but Bryan even manages to be featured in one of them.
Lightning over the high desert of Arizona near Winslow
My friend and fellow storm chaser Bryan Snider shooting a thunderstorm over the Painted Desert near Winslow, AZ
Lightning over the high desert of Arizona near Winslow
Lightning over the high desert of Arizona near Winslow
Well, there you have it. My favorite images of 2014. I really do hope that you have enjoyed this collection of images and I want to wish each and everyone of you a great 2015, may it be far better than 2014.
A flower given the Topaz Glow treatment
If you are at all familiar with my work you know that I rarely push post processing beyond the limits of keeping my images looking as “natural” and “realistic” as possible. I never want to have someone compliment by work by saying that I did a great job with post processing. I want people to judge my work as a whole, based on the image itself. Because of that you will rarely ever see me share images that have gone through filters to make them look like oil paintings nor will you see me share images that are over the top HDR with that cartoony look that we all know all too well. With all of that said, you might be wondering why I am sharing this image that I processed with the new Topaz Glow from Topaz Labs?
Well, the short answer is that even though I don’t share a lot of images like this, I still have a lot of fun playing around with them, and another short answer is that I am a Topaz affiliate and they ask me to evaluate their new offerings, but the real answer would that the new Topaz Glow is not only a lot of fun, it does crazy cool things to images of fairly normal things.
I will be doing a much deeper dig into Topaz Glow after the holidays, amazing how busy things are right now, but I wanted to share this first image that I processed with it. This is actually an iPhone 6 image I made of a flower during a recent trip to Tacoma and beyond simply running it through the Glow plugin, I did nothing else to it.
Stay tuned for my deeper look at the product, but in the meantime if you would like to give it a try for yourself simply click on the links that I have included in the body of this blog post. They will take you to the Topaz site where you can download trials of all their products, including Glow.
