On This Date: Photo taken 1/1/2008.
On the first day of 2008 I took my then-brand-new Nikon D300, set it to capture black-and-white pix, and wandered down our street snapping merrily away. 'Twas my first serious session with the camera, and I was quite pleased with the results.
I still am.
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This photo was taken from our yard, looking north. There's now a garage obstructing this view--that's OK; the neighbors needed it.
I make a calendar for friends and family every year, and a color version of this photograph is the January pic for that calendar's 2017 edition. They're really not much different, but in many ways I prefer this rendering.
Here's the plan for "On This Date:" Each day this year I'll post a photograph taken on the same date in some other year. Should be a fun way to look back at my photography.
I'll fill in the details for the project plan over the next few days.
Number of pix taken on various January 1sts: 218
Year of oldest photo: 1977
How I Rated the Date's Photographs:
1 Star: 1
2 Stars: 25
3 Stars: 134
4 Stars: 47
5 Stars: 11
Tags: Weather Snow Michigan D300 Nikon D300 2008 Tree #0573 January Mulliken Village Winter Nikon Black and White B&W Monochrome 1/366 On This Date
On This Date: Photo taken 1/2/2006.
This house is gone, now, but over the years I photographed it several times. It was in Danby Township, between Mulliken and Portland, and likely had a view of the Grand River when it was built.
The 2006 photo set shows a mobile home and a shed beyond that garage, and there was a mostly intact barn in the field, just out of this frame. By 2012 the garage and shed had gone, and the trailer and barn were largely collapsed. A few months ago everything remaining was removed and there's little trace of what was once someone's pride and joy.
I've discussed the place before--here, and here. I'd like to think you'd find those interesting.
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I spent about a year cataloguing my photographs a couple years back, using IDImager's Photo Supreme to build the database. The software's powerful, but under-documented. I can highly recommend it if you're willing to put in the effort to figure it out, but you should find something else if you're not. After two years of hard use I'm still finding features.
I've taken a couple hundred thousand photos in my life. (Yes, I know of folks who've taken many more. It's still a substantial collection.) The catalogue I've built makes finding, say, every photo I took on January 2 a realistic project. Or every photo of this farmyard.
Number of pix taken on various January 2nds: 254
Year of oldest photo: 2006
How I Rated the Date's Photographs:
1 Star: 4
2 Stars: 32
3 Stars: 183
4 Stars: 32
5 Stars: 3
Tags: Maize Corn Stubble Fields Michigan 2006 Danby Ionia County Sky Tree January #1138 House Farmyard Paved Road Fuji FinePix F10 FujiFilm Fujifilm FinePix F10 Pocket Cam F10 Finepix On This Date 2/366
On This Date: Photo taken 1/3/2008.
Explored! #204 on 1/4/2017. Thanks!
For over three decades I worked in an office building on the edge of a swamp. The bog seems to be nameless these days, but it's the remnant of a much larger swamp the early white settlers called "The Old Maid." They thought it was pretty spooky, and mostly avoided it.
Perhaps trees like this were part of the reason.
Wish I knew where that name came from. But no one seems to have recorded an explanation.
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I've been taking photographs since I was a teenager. But mostly I don't take pictures in January.
How sure am I of the dates on my photographs? Well, I'm pretty much like everyone else. For images taken with digital cameras, I'm (of course) pretty sure of the photo's date. For scanned photographs (mostly taken prior to 2005), I'm real sure of a few but for most I've only a vague notion when they were taken. I'm mostly ignoring those for this project, though I imagine I'll discuss them a bit from time to time.
See my April 12 commentary for some further discussion of this issue.
Just for the record: I bought my first digital pocket camera on 12/18/2002, and my first DSLR on 2/12/2005. I've occasionally used film SLRs since 2005, but I'm predominantly a digital photographer these days.
Number of pix taken on various January 3rds: 169
Year of oldest photo: 2008
How I Rated the Date's Photographs:
. 1 Star: 6
. 2 Stars: 8
. 3 Stars: 120
. 4 Stars: 31
. 5 Stars: 4
Tags: Nikon D300 Nikon D300 2008 Winter Weather Snow Michigan Eaton County State Secondary Complex Dimondale Tree Frost #0581 January On This Date 3/366
On This Date: Photo taken 1/4/2011.
I've little to say about this one. The house was a bright spot in a grey day, so I stopped the car and captured the light.
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Tell us about the Stars, Joel.
The first thing to understand is that my rating system's quick and dirty. I rate the pix as part of my tagging process, usually in a hurry, and rarely "correct" 'em later even if I notice a mistake. The second thing to understand is that the ratings are mine, and used only to help me sort my photographs. That said, they suit my purpose, which is to identify the "best" photographs.
One Star means I totally messed it up, and can't tell from the photo what the subject was. An occasional photo in this group could have some decorative value, but most folks would toss these.
Two Stars mean there's something wrong with the photo. I moved the camera, or got the focus wrong, or totally blew the framing, or something else went wrong. Some of these could be recovered with work, but these, too, many people would just toss.
I also put pix taken to illustrate eBay sales here, for lack of a better place. Scans and photographs of baseball scorecards and other documents also go here, for the same reason.
Three Stars is a catch-all. Procedurally, all photographs start here; some get moved to other categories. These are good photographs, but there's nothing special about them.
Four Stars means I did everything right--the picture's sharp, well-composed, and otherwise print-worthy. I probably like the photo, too, but that's not a requirement.
Five Stars means the photograph's a favorite. Most, but not all, also meet the Four Star requirement of technical excellence.
For a 40 photograph outing these days, I usually rate one or two pix at 5, four or five at 4, three at 2, and one at 1; the rest would be 3.
My baseball pix are rated on a different, but similar, scale. The main difference is that fewer pix get rated 2, 4, or 5.
Number of pix taken on various January 4ths: 423
Year of oldest photo: 2011
How I Rated the Date's Photographs:
. 1 Star: 26
. 2 Stars: 154
. 3 Stars: 193
. 4 Stars: 47
. 5 Stars: 3
The very high 2 Star count deserves a comment: About half of these were perhaps-failed equipment experiments; the other half were of a single hawk photographed through a difficult window. I got some good ones of the hawk, too.
Tags: Sony DSC-H55 Sony DSC-H55 Sony Cybershot Cybershot Pocket Cam 2011 Winter Weather Snow Michigan Eaton County Oneida Tree House Sky Cloud Farmyard Light and Shadow Shadowplay #1190 January On This Date 4/366
On This Date: Photo taken 1/5/2015.
The weather's pretty reliably bad on January 5, so I often stay home all day. At least three times I've set up my tripod and shot pix of birds in the yard.
"New Camera" note: Didn't stay home on 1/5/2007: Went to hear Rachael Davis & Steppin' in It (as Shout Sister Shout!) at the Creole Gallery, and took the first of a dozen photographs I'd capture with my Palm Treo smartphone.
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Thought I'd give all of us a break from the long essays today....
Number of pix taken on various January 5ths: 491
Year of oldest photo: 2006
How I Rated the Date's Photographs:
. 1 Star: 7
. 2 Stars: 71
. 3 Stars: 344
. 4 Stars: 55
. 5 Stars: 14
Tags: Potter Yard Tree Home Snow Mulliken #2706 January Nikon Jay Branch Bird Blue Jay Nikon 1 V2 1 V2 V2 Weather Winter 2015 5/366 On This Date