It took me a while, but I finally have all the photos from A Year in Pictures up in a set on Flickr. Complete with tags! So if you want an easier way to browse through them all than paging back through my blog archives, now you have it.
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This is almost certainly the best photo of St. Paul’s Cathedral I’ve ever taken, and it’s mostly because of luck: I was coming home from research during the Midnight Never Come trip, and the sky had cleared just enough in the west to let the sunset light through. But the air behind the dome was still filled with clouds, and this brilliant contrast was the result.
It seems a fitting note to end this series on. 🙂 I missed a single day in the Year in Pictures project — November 10th, because I failed to schedule something ahead of time for the day I’d be traveling back from World Fantasy — so you get one extra today to make up for it. I’m proud of myself for missing only one (though frustrated that I didn’t have a perfect record); this turned out to be, well, precisely as big of an undertaking as I expected it to be. I’m glad I did it, though: several of you have commented repeatedly to let me know you enjoyed certain pictures, which reassured me that I would not be the only person interested in a public series of my photos.
Stats in the end: 260 five-star pictures posted, 172 not posted. (Not counting my shots from New York and DC, which haven’t been edited yet on account of Lightroom needing to update for my new camera model.) That latter number is . . . ye gods. A goodly way toward being able to do a second round of this, though boy howdy no I am not doing that any time soon. Maybe in a few years, when I’ve traveled to other places and gotten more fresh material — many of the 172 unposted are very similar to ones I did post. Though really, travel isn’t as necessary as it used to be: one effect of getting more serious about my photography is that I see more opportunities for it right in my own back yard. Even so, there’s nothing like visiting a foreign country to give me an itchy shutter finger. ^_^
I hope you all enjoyed this, and many thanks to everyone who commented along the way!
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To close out the year, another light in the darkness: this time, it’s lanterns at Yasaka Jinja in Kyoto.
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Sometimes my favorite bits are not the big, coherent, famous ones, but the unimportant little details off to the side. I don’t know what this inscription in the Roman Forum belongs to, or what its significance might be; I don’t need to. The thing itself is enough.
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I don’t know why this sloop has red sails, but it made for a different “ship on the water” photo than most of the others I’ve taken — and I do like me some “ship on the water” shots.
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Since the last time I visited the Tower of London, they’ve added a bunch of sculptures: mesh statues of the kinds of animals that used to be kept in the menagerie, and these steel-band figures of soldiers on the walls. This crossbowman is cranking his weapon on the wall walk along (I believe) the eastern side.
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One last shot from the Wieliczka Salt Mine. I’m not positive that this is the Virgin Mary, but given how heavily Catholic the area is, that’s my bet. (It’s her or St. Kinga, in all likelihood; there’s a legend associating St. Kinga with the mine.) She is, of course, carved out of salt, and the lighting makes the most of the translucent quality.
Merry Christmas to all those who celebrate it, and I hope the rest of you have a splendid day, too.
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I am fudging ever so slightly: while I like this shot, I don’t consider it to be one of my absolute best. But it’s from a display of Christmas lights at Edaville in Massachusetts, and is the most fitting thing I could post for Christmas Eve.
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A final shot from the incredibly photogenic Fukushu-en in Naha. The little bridge over this stream had statues of sages on each of its posts, each one unique in design.
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Last night was the longest night of the year. This morning, I give you the oculus in the ceiling of the Pantheon, glowing like a miniature sun.
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That isn’t snow on the ladder and tools; it’s an encrustation of salt crystals, built up over I don’t know how long — decades at least. This part of the Wieliczka Salt Mine looked like a winter wonderland.
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Bodies of water are a mixed bag in photography: they’re very boring and flat and featureless, unless they’re reflecting stuff well or have something floating on them. This is a case of the latter making the image far more interesting than it would have been otherwise.
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Maybe it’s a gazelle? I don’t know; I can’t tell my ungulates apart. It’s some kind of four-legged creature with horns, and it is one of the countless animal figures adorning random bits of the Natural History Museum in London, aka the Victorian cathedral to St. Darwin.
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Okay, so it isn’t a menorah. (Actually, these candles are in Notre Dame, so really not Jewish.) But I love the image of little flames burning against the dark, and this is the most suitable picture I have to mark the beginning of Hanukkah. May those of you who celebrate it have a wonderful few days — and those of you who don’t celebrate it, too!
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I mentioned earlier this year that you have to walk barefoot up to Sravanabelagola, the Jain temple we visited in southern India. This is what the staircase looks like: steps carved into the enormous barren rock on which the temple itself stands. They bake in the sun, and therefore bake your feet, which is possibly part of the reason you’re supposed to walk there barefoot — I don’t know for sure.
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This is one of the more thoroughly reconstructed bits of Ephesus in Turkey. The people in charge of the place only rebuild a structure if they have enough pieces and enough sense of where they originally went to be confident of what they’re showing you; this one is obviously still missing quite a bit, but you can get a good sense of what the temple looked like back in the day.
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This tree, in the Lal Bagh Gardens of Bangalore, is just utterly spectacular. (Nor is it the only spectacular tree there — but it’s the one I was able to get the best picture of.)
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I have a deep and abiding love for this kind of green. Add in the warm tones of the wood and the beautiful architecture — this is another traditional-style church in the Zakopane region of Poland — and I am exceedingly happy with the result.
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I miss the style of architecture where things would be decorated just because. Even in “elite” buildings nowadays, the sorts of things where we pour lots of money into the construction, we’re very minimalist; we don’t have random little dragons holding up basins on the walls. Which is a pity, because I do love the posture and the expression on this guy’s face.
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Another shot from the garden of Fukushu-en in Naha, because it was so bloody photogenic. 🙂 I actually don’t know whether the little figures on the roof points ought to be called “Buddhas” or not; that’s just what I mentally label that style of statue. Boddhisatvas? I welcome corrections in the comments.
