2024: In Review

2024 was the year Covid finally caught us. I spent most of the year doing one day a fortnight in the office, and it was on one of these days that unluckily I picked it up. Thankfully we didn’t have bad symptoms and managed to muddle through.

January

2024 started wet. Our drive back up from Sharon’s parents was diverted after some flooding on our usual route, with a car stuck in the water. Photographic themes for the month included the snooker table that used to be owned by Sharon’s Grandfather. We brought it back up with us and used it for some still life alongside playing some games. We also had fun with cotton reels, and a lego space ship once I had finished building it.

February

February saw some more themed photoshop messing, with a week spent playing with figures on top of pyramids, another week playing with door reflections, and some squares with four trees in.

March

We had a week near Whitby in early March, and I produced a series of textures images using images of people on the beach. Most of the textures came from the side of some boats that were up out of the water. There were some great textures that already looked like landscapes.

April

In April we took many photos of flowers, and then towards the end of the month we had a week on the west coast, visiting Blackpool, Morecambe and Grange Over Sands.

May

May was a month of exhibitions, visiting the Yorkshire Exhibition Assembly in Barnsley, and the more local Otley Camera Club exhibition in a church in Otley. Sharon picked up a couple of certificates in the Yorkshire Exhibition, I didn’t do so well this time. The Otley exhibition enlisted the support of a group of cosplayers who dressed up in Star Wars costumes and encouraged people into the church.

June

The standout images from June for me, were a series of five images based around the arrows on the floor of a car park. The YPU Exhibition in Barnsley was near a fairly new car park, with red areas on the floor with arrows painted on them. I remixed some photos of these to create a set of arrow art.

It was the back end of June we finally got caught by Covid. Felt like the flu to us, although we did both have a change in smell and taste – particularly BBQ sauce, which moved towards the smell of alcohol hand gel.

July

Thankfully we’d recovered from Covid enough to visit Castleton at the end of July, on a long planned family meet up. Sharon’s brother and his wife were over from Australia, and so the four of us and Sharon’s parents met up for a week at a cottage together. We enjoyed walking in what was probably the warmest week of the year.

August

In August I bought a new wireless Elinchrom flash head, and set up the water droplet kit thinking I’d now be able to get some good shots. In the end it was still too slow in flash duration, and having a couple of speedlights set to very low power was still the way to go. Adding a little food colouring, some gels on the flashes made for some colourful images. We also added some xanthan gum to thicken up the water, which did help.

September

September I produced a series of five images based around the theme “Letters To The Cosmos”. These features some 18th Century Letters we bought at an antiques fair over the summer, textures from an elephant on the sea front at Blackpool, and some photos of oil in water.

Towards the end of the month we travelled down to Kent for a visit to Margate where Sharon’s grandparents used to live. The end of the trip was particularly memorable, we managed to hit a deer when we were nearly back home.

October

October saw us talking photos of the scare actors at the Leeds Scare Trails once more. They managed to raise nearly £10,000 for charity this year.

The camera club had qualified for Blackburn again this year, so we travelled over the pennines for that, stopping off at Queen Street Mill on the way over.

November

We were down at Carleton for a YPU event in early November, and for the first time we had a walk around near the hall where the meeting was held. There is an interesting grove of trees visible up a hill from the hall, and I produced a series of creative images made from photos of those trees. I also spent some more time with the water droplet kit this month, this time with added smoke from a newly purchased Smoke Ninja smoke machine.

December

The smoke machine got some use again during December, when I took the shapes it created and flipped them to create some symmetrical images. What can you see?

After failing to sort out anything to do with the DPAGB during 2024, it’s again on our list to start looking at in 2025. We’d also like to see if we can finally get over the requirement for BPE 1, after being nearly there for several years now.