Year in Review: 2014

As we say at the end of every passing year: Man, that was quick.

At least, that's what I said right before I started sorting through the photos I would put into this post.  I couldn't believe I took these pictures all in the same year.  In no particular order, this year I:

Went to Seoul.

Got a membership at the ICP.

Made my own business cards.

Went to the beach.

Went for a walk in the rain.

Celebrated Mother's Day.

Learned how to use wide angle lenses.

Photographed a wedding (wow, I still can't believe that was THIS year).

Replaced my Sony RX100 with an Olympus XA.

Went to another wedding, but not as photographer.

Bought a Leica.

Borrowed a Voigtlander Vito II.

Learned to use an even wider lens.

 

Hung out with friends.

Took a picture of a cat.

Went to Iceland.

And just took a lot of photos.

Whew.  

Anyway, this post wasn't really meant to be a best-of.  It's more of a collection of the in-betweens that get forgotten in time in favor of the heavy hitters -- the ones I kind of forgot I took.  Years feel short because we forget all of the little details.  Life would be pretty exhausting if it was just a solid chain of salient events.

And that's why I'm glad I started this blog.  I honestly didn't think it'd make it through the year.  I thought it would either turn into a slog or just be abandoned completely.  You are currently reading post #66 of a blog that started about a year ago.  Granted, almost half of that was from that daily blogging in November that never really made it the entire month.

2014 felt short, but going through the photos I took really stretched it back out and brought me back to the spot where I stood when I took them.  I learned a lot, too.  I thought I was only a street photographer, but having gone through so many different styles and taking photos with all different cameras and equipment really brought me back to the beginning -- just a photographer in search of a good photo.

Now I see why people keep diaries.  If you use Facebook or Instagram, go back and scroll through your year.  Don't just use the auto-year-in-review stuff -- check out the days when you complained about the bus being late, or when someone did something nice for you, or when you had a few good drinks with friends and family.  There's bound to be something you forgot.

Trust me, 2014 was just as long as any other year, and we got plenty done.  2015 will be just the same.

Iceland Part 5 - Wrapup

We don't really take many pictures together, but I'd always wanted to try the Leica M3's self timer.  My dad's Minolta SR-T 303b had the same thing -- a lever on the front that you turn to the side, revealing a button underneath.  You wind the lever, and then when you're ready you hit the button and the camera starts buzzing like a wind-up toy and you have an indeterminate length of time to get into position to watch it wind down until it finally fires the shutter.  Some of my earliest memories are of watching that lever slowly wind its way back.

The last leg of our tour was the Snaefellsness Peninsula, about 90 minutes north of Reykjavik.  At the end is the Snaefellsjokull national park, named for the glacier-capped Snaefellsjokull mountain, which was the entrance point for Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth.

We didn't climb the mountain, and we didn't see much of it either; most of it was shrouded by the heavy cloud cover we had that day.  It perfectly fine, though, because the whole peninsula was just as scenic as the rest of Iceland.  The north is a calm, sheltered drive that will take you across gaping fjords and peaceful mountain passes.  The south is a heavily worn coastline, populated by brave sea birds unafraid of the crashing waves of the North Atlantic.

We did manage to see Songhellir, or "Song Cave".  It's a weird network of tunnels bored, presumably by lava, into the side of Snaefellsjokull.  It gets its name from the deep reverberations you hear when you step inside and make sounds.  If you've ever messed around with an audio effects processor and maxed out the "reverb" knob, it would sound a lot like what you hear in Songhellir; you feel it in your chest.  Because of this, the cave was a popular site for rituals.  The walls are covered in runes and more recent graffiti.

We ended our trip with two calm days in Reykjavik, just wandering around and getting mentally prepared for the trip back home.  We could probably have spent the time exploring even further out onto the island, but we felt we had seen enough for one trip and promised each other we'd come back to see the rest.

I'm out of things to say about Iceland and I'm not really sure how to conclude it, so I'll just put out the rest of the photos and call it a day.  I hope you enjoyed the photos, and I hope it encourages you to visit Iceland and see for yourself.  I can't imagine there being a way to do it wrong.  The trip was very loosely planned.  We would set a destination the night before, book a hotel there, and set out in the morning, stopping at anything remotely interesting along the way.  Every time we pulled over to take a closer look at something, it was totally worth it.

By the way, there's some pretty good ice cream in Reykjavik.  Try the Turkish pepper flavor.

Birds Intermission

Here.  Have some more zoo animals.

Sheep Intermission

Sorry, I actually have another roll and a half of Iceland left, but I just need to stop looking at Iceland pictures for a while.  Any way, here's a picture of a sheep I took at the zoo over the weekend.

Iceland Part 4 - Miscellany

You can get get an eyeful of nature just driving along the Ring Road, but there are destinations.  You should really visit Jokulsarlon, the glacier lagoon.  What isn't apparent from pictures is the sounds of the lagoon.  There's a bit of a breeze rippling the water, but aside from that, the only sound is the sound of the icebergs bumping gently into each other, and then the occasional splash of a large chunk breaking off.  The area is peaceful, but it's alive with slow, subtle movement.

There's also the Golden Circle, not to be confused with the Ring Road.  It's a circuit that starts by Reykjavik and visits a bunch of interesting sites.  Our first stop was at Geysir and Strokkur.  Geysir is the original spouting spring that gave geysers their name.  However, it was rendered inactive in the early 1900s because people kept throwing rocks into it to get it to erupt.  Luckily its neighbor, Strokkur, still diligently erupts every 5 to 10 minutes.

I had my red filter on because I thought I had loaded my black and white film, but it turned out to be Ektar.  Some of them survived conversion to B&W, but for the most part it wasn't very pretty.

Also on the Golden Circle tour were Gullfoss, which was depicted in the previous post, and Thingvellir park, which we had to skip because we ran out of sunlight.

For lack of a decent segue, here are some more rocks that I forgot to post from the previous post: