Martin Bailey Photography : The Blog

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Happy New Year!! 2010 has begun, and today to start a new year of podcasts and photography, and I have a feeling it’s going to be a great year! And to kick off, now in its third iteration, today I’m going to take you through my own personal selection of my top ten images from 2009.

I really enjoy going through the exercise of looking back through my last year’s images, and trying to decide which ten really are my favorites. It gives you a view of your progression, and when I compare this to my list from 2008, I certainly feel happier with this year’s work, although I do still very much like my selection from 2008 as well.

The good thing about going back through your images from an entire year is that many weeks and sometimes months has passed, since we made most of the photographs, and so you can be a little bit more subjective. As we’ve mentioned many times, when you have just shot something, you can be a little more influenced by the experience and excitement of the shoot, and therefore favor some images that you might not quite like as much later on.

I like to give my images at least two or three days to simmer before I make my final selection of what images I am going to take further in my work-flow, and upload to my gallery etc. When possible, I like to give them a week or so. After many months have passed though, when you look back at the images, they have to really stand on their own merits for you to still really like them. This gives me confidence that anything that makes this list really is my best work from 2009. Well, actually, to really do this properly, I should probably do this around February or March time, but the start of the year just seems a better time to do this.

Here are some quick stats on my selection process before we look at the top ten. On my first pass through my 380 or so best shots from 2009, I was left with a shortlist of 50 images initially. That’s around 13%, which I’m pleased with. Even though I felt like dropping a few more into the favorites bucket, I left many out because I knew that they’d be trumped by other images. The 50 were ones that I knew I was going to have to compare side by side before making a decision.

A second pass go me down to 26 images, and now it started to get really difficult to remove further images. You kind of switch into a different mode and feel more like an assassin than a photographer at this point. I got down to 15, and had to take a break for a while. In the end, I had to turn to my art director (read wife) for advice. She has a different eye to me, and a different sense of the aesthetic to a degree, but she can also be that little bit more subjective than I can, and is always a great help in these final culling stages. Let’s take a look at what was left after my final ruthless cull down to 10 images. Note that we’re going to look at these in chronological order, and not the in priority of how much I like each image or anything like that.

First up is image number 2103 (above) from early February, the weekend before last year’s Hokkaido Workshop. This is a White Eye bird, shot in the early blossoming Kan-zakura flower. These little birds are native to Japan and here all year round, but they come to feed on the nectar in the blossom early every spring, and although they move very fast, there are enough of them to be able to get a few shots if you visit a park with the trees in them. This was shot in the Shinjuku Gyoen park, in Tokyo. I particularly like this shot because of that sea of pink in which the bird is situated. This particular tree is often so full of blossom that you can create the entire background with pink, making a beautiful setting for your subject. This is also one of those few occasions when I think that bulls-eyeing the image worked, as we can see the White Eye is smack in the middle of the frame, though the eye is slightly off-center, which does help to reduce the bulls-eye effect a little. » Read Full Post with Comments ››››

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