I like the idea suggested by Jim Goldstein to make a post summarizing the past year, 2009, in my photography. It is a great way to look back at the projects I did this year, and what I learned.

January

Winter in Iowa – lots of snow, lots of fun. We took bike for a ride in fresh snow to get some great sports images.

February

I took a class in Lensbaby photography at Betterphoto.com. I was almost exclusively photographing with Lensbaby for a duration of the class, and did few interesting series of macro shots with it.

March

A friend of mine was put on alert that I am polishing my photographic skills and when his assignment came, I was invited along. I was helping him, most of the time, but also had some time to shoot the Mexican food myself.

April

Not that much time to photograph, between friend’s visit for Easter and my parents coming for a visit. But we took them for Iowa Wine Trail tasting, which always is a great photographic opportunity.

May

This was a though one to pick one photo from May. We did our wonderful Four Corner vacation, and it was just one great photo after the other.

June

Fun Days in town, midway and car show basically across the street- a lot of shooting. Another winning photo for a local recreation center contest and great collection of automobile pictures.

July

D300 joined the family. I was made promise I will take at least 100 photos a week. I think I am taking far more, in last few months I doubled the amount of pictures on my hard drive compared to previous year and a half. And my favorite for this month is one of my rose series.

August

The Airventure and two pilots in tow, there was still a lot of time to photograph, and plenty of occasions.

September

Another addition the the camera bag- this time, the handy, small, always with me iPhone. I started the series of posting an iPhone photo once a week. We also did a large food photography project and collected them in a cookbook we took as presents for family back home.

October

We went back home for a wedding, and took a chance to photograph it as an assignment. A beautiful wedding album came out as a result of it, and we were happy to share it with bride and groom.

November

Another edition of Iowa Wine Trail, we went all the way and visited almost all galleries on the trail. Most of the images are still waiting to be looked at, but the airplanes in HDR project was fun to shoot, and fun to print. We have several from the series on a living room wall.

December

After the trip to New York, and making a lot of HDR images I still didn’t get to put together, it is a month of intense work on blog, with addition of galleries and header.

Summary? It was a great year, I learned a lot, and I assume my photographic skills improved as well. I got a chance to try different types of photography, and work with different types of cameras. I am starting to think in terms of projects, rather then opportunities happening during any given photowalk. I am starting to realize what my favorite subjects are.

This was really busy year for me, photographically that is. I was taking far more pictures every week than I was able to process. I am browsing through last years part of my Lightroom catalog, discovering images and series of images I did not have a chance to post on the blog. I am just making notes of all the galleries I can put together, if and when I have time to process all this stuff.
This week gallery is a collection of images we took last spring, when visiting Chicago with my parents. It was a hectic time when they were here, and I think I did not post for several weeks. All those nice images disappeared in the bulk.
There is a story behind the shoot- we took the Architecture Cruise in Windy City twice already. Both times in April. One at the beginning, one at the end. Both times, it was raining with temperatures around 40F. Not a great photo weather.

This past weekend, my husband mainly, but me some as well, put a lot of work in organizing the galleries on my blog. We created a separate page, where all Monday Galleries can be browsed, and you can click on the image to open a gallery and view all the images in there. I am going to be adding new galleries I publish on the blog right there as well. He also did this wonderful changing header. Thanks!
On the occasion, I realized that I have some galleries in the folder which were not linked to blog posts, and decided to publish at least some of them. Today’s gallery was made last spring, in a Mexican restaurant in Cedar Rapids, where I went with a friend of mine, who was takings shots for a menu. When he was busy photographing his assignment, I was shooting from the side with my Lensbaby. I did some additional editing today, before publishing this gallery- after all, I learned some more about post-processing in last 9 months .

We spend yesterday’s meal with some of our friends and colleagues, and although it was a very international group, we had rather traditional meal. With absolutely minimalistic set-up- on camera flash without any modifier ( I had a nice diffuser for on flash camera which I gave away and still did not buy back. Bummer.), I took some decent pictures of our dishes.

We went to our favorite small airport to do some flying yesterday, but the weather was not exactly perfect for cross-country. Not risking getting stuck in middle-of-nowhere, Iowa for undetermined amount of time, we turned around and decided to spend the midday photographic planes rather then flying them. More fun for me, if anybody asks . We saw somewhere around the net the HDR gallery for planes, and wanted to give it a try. Again, we disagreed on the post-processing and artistic concept of the project . Tomasz liked more hard-core HDR, which are a bit too much for me. So I ended up processing resulting 12 Citabria and 19 Cherokee images in two ways, and then finishing them off with two different concepts in mind. But I have to admit, having a lot of time, a lot of point-of-views, made the project so much fun! And why not black-and-white or selective colors? Especially if the yellow plane is competing for attention with yellow grass (man, I really did not notice it until I had final processed images on the screen!). Check it out.

I took this panorama last Sunday during the Iowa Wine Trail drive around Eastern Iowa. We actually stayed overnight in very popular Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, and where crossing the river back to Marquette, Iowa, when I noticed the observation deck with the view over the Mississippi river. With my Nikon 10.5 mm fisheye I took the panorama, and when I prepared it for a blog, I figured that the Airthight SimpleViewer gallery in LR2 might provide an interesting way to view the resulting image. Click on the small version and see for yourself.

I don’t think I mentioned it already on a blog, but a couple of weeks ago I had a unique chance to see, if wedding photography is something I could do. Tomasz’s brother was getting married, so since we had to make the unplanned trip back home anyway, we took all our gear, I did some reading beforehand (I actually follow two wedding photogs blogs), and we decided to treat it as serious assignment. I think I will tell more about my/our experience in photographing a wedding next week. Because after downloading about 300o images from two days of shooting and deciding that Tomasz is making a photo album (maybe he will share some experience on blog when he is done? ),
I decided to focus on acquiring new skill. I thought how about, instead of just putting put a gallery on blog, maybe I will make a slide show? And the whole new story started.
Now I am digressing.
When Lightroom 3 Beta showed up a couple of weeks ago, I read on few blogs about new features and although Tomasz downloaded it and suggested that I install it as well, I decided I have no need. I remember how excited I was about LR 2 local adjustment capability, but I have not seen anything for me in LR3. For about a week . And when I stared to think how to put together this slide show, I recalled something I read about LR3, and decided that, after all, I want to try. For a music addition and video format export of slide show.
For a minute, I was put off by the fact that LR3 cannot read LR2 catalog. It was what made me not wanting to try in the first place. But I figured a way around, when it turned out that xmp side-car remembers not only Develop module changes, but also color-coding, which help restore collections in LR3. Export really seemed a blink of the eye, but I was importing images already on hard drive, not through USB. My Import impressions are.. none. I am not unhappy with it, I am also not excited about it. It probably means that is functional all right . Nothing impressive (or unnerving, either) in Develop, just sometimes (then- sometimes not) the images edited in CS4 would not automatically “come back” to LR3, so I need to import them manually. Overall, I made the slide show and I am happy with it, but the jury is out there if I will buy it right after it is released. We will see. In this moment, I probably will quit using LR3 for my current projects, and avoid problems with having images in both versions.
And to come back to my slide show. I decided to make two of them, separate the snaps of the wedding day from posed outside images. So today is part one- walk in the park.

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Have I already mention a trip to Reiman Gardens, this time when the Butterfly Wing was still open and full of butterflies? I put together a gallery of my best images from the trip to this incredible place. Just look at the opening image here, on blog, and try to image the feeling when all those butterflies fly around you. It is very hard to photograph it the way it shows real richness of the experience. See, how many creatures can you find on this image.
I enjoyed photographing the butterflies on those various colorful backgrounds, with shallow depth of field.

Last weekend, we went off for a trip through Central Iowa, hoping to get some fall colors. Lucky for us, there was enough of them yet. Lucky, because not only this weekend it was already snowing, but also we are off for a wedding on the other side of “The Pond”. No time to shoot fall colors this fall , not any more at least. But here is a gallery of the images from that intense weekend, made mainly, but not only, in Ledges State Park.

Looking for a topic for today’s gallery, and not having any “fresh work” done past weekend, I realized I have a lot pictures, beautiful images of Utah never shown before on the blog, from my Four Corners vacation this spring. It was so long ago, that I almost forgot I had any vacation this year! Anyway, I went back and prepared a small gallery of some of my favorite shots, trying to make it very diverse at the same time. There might be one or two, which was already on the blog.