Photographs by Frank

As has been my longstanding habit*, here is my “Adams Dozen” for 2020… the year of the pandemic.

Being retired and living a generally quiet life in the New Hampshire woods, our life has not been changed nearly as much as many others have. We made no big trips this year, but I still got out in the neighborhood regularly to make photographs**.

One of the highlights of this year was the successful nesting of a pair of loons on Gregg lake; the first in living memory. I spent many enjoyable hours back in May and June watching (and photographing) the nesting adults and then the pair of chicks, that joined them. Both juveniles successfully fledged this fall and headed to the ocean.

You will be glad to know that I have included only one loon photo and a single dragonfly photo among the dozen… there are many, many more of each subject in this year’s collection!

Additionally, I used some of my “home time” this summer to start making cyanotypes again (after a twelve year hiatus). This fall I also experimented with hand coloring black and white prints. I intend to keep making both type of prints in the future.

* The first edition (from 2011) explains the genesis of this tradition and here is last year’s edition.

** For those keeping track, I made 6651 exposures in 2020 (about two-thirds of what I made in 2019) and processed 1037 of these (about 15% of the total) which is about average.

It has been my habit at the end of each year to choose an ‘Adams Dozen’ of photos made during the year.

This is my ninth installment. The first iteration was 2011 and for the sake of organization, here is last year’s version. One can find the rest of the years by searching the blog for “Adams Dozen”.

Here is this year’s selection.:

For those keeping count, my Lightroom catalog says that I made 9648 exposures in 2019 and that I processed 1643 (or 17%) of the photographs. This is about a thousand less total exposures and a couple of percent more processed than last year.

This post represents the eighth annual installment in my “Adams Dozen” tradition. Whereby, as each year ends, I choose a dozen of my favorite photographs from the past year.

In the first installment of this series, I stated that choosing twelve photographs was “not as hard as I thought it might be”. However, it is my impression that the selection becomes more difficult each year. I do not have a clue why this seems so, but I struggled this year to narrow the group down to just a dozen.

I could have filled out my selection just using photos from our trip to the Grand Canyon and other places in the southwest but I worked to pick images from throughout the year. The first of this set was made back in January and the last two about six weeks ago in mid-November.

Without further ado, here are the twelve photographs, representing roughly one-percent* of my “keepers” for the year:

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* For those who are keeping track, my Lightroom catalog says that I made 10,733 exposure this year. Of that number I finalized 1542 (about 14%) of them. The former number is a bit lower than it has been in the past (the average for the five previous years is about 13,800) and the latter number is a bit higher than usual (again the average for the past five years is 10.7%).

Well, it is that time of the year… time to choose my “Adams Dozen” for 2016.

Long-time readers will remember that at the end of each year I pick my twelve favorite (best?) photos of the year; a tradition I began back in 2011 (see this post).

In choosing photos for this collection, I did not consider images from the three projects (Barn Board, Autumnal Abstracts – 2016 and ‘Belfries, Spires, Etc.’ that I have been working on this year. The first two projects are more-or-less finished while the third is still a work in progress. These will be presented in due time.

Thus, the photos selected for my Adams Dozen are ‘singletons’ (i.e. not part of any project).

Here they are:

I am still having trouble with my gallery software. I have figured out a work around for getting titles displayed but I still am unable to control the order in which the photos are displayed… #$@!&* computers!!!

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