Year in Review 2015

This is going to be a long post to close the year of 2015, so please bear with me. This year marks the 5th year of my photography journey, and this year has been a roller coaster ride for me. A lot of changes in terms of gear that I’m using, and there are a lot of things that I learnt throughout the year.

This year, I managed to get a real taste of shooting with a “real” film camera… the Nikon FM3A. I shot quite a number of rolls ranging from colour film such as Kodak Gold 200 and Pro 400H, to black & white film such as BW400CN, T-Max 400 and Neopan Across 100. The experience of shooting with film camera has been very enjoyable, and I get to understand more on the roots of photography, like how the classic metering system works, manual focusing, focus and recompose and so on. I also get to appreciate different types of film and their output, and to train myself to become more precise in executing a shot before triggering the shutter. Eventually, I have sold the camera off and yes I’m regretting on this decision.

The year of 2015 marks the beginning of my journey through the world of rangefinder. I’d always been curious and eager to try out a rangefinder, but the price of the camera has always put me off. It’s not cheap and I don’t feel comfortable to just asked for one from my friend to try and shoot for a period of time. There came the opportunity for me to buy over a Leica M9-P from my friend at a very attractive price. I bought it over, battled my way with the rangefinder and eventually fell in love with it. Later on, I decided that I “need” the better performance from the new Leica M Type 240, and so ended up selling the M9-P and got myself the Leica M-P Type 240. Actually both are brilliant cameras, but I’ll talk about it a little more next time on the story surrounding this change.

And last but not least… the year of 2015 also marks the end of my 2 years journey with Fujifilm cameras. Yes, from X-E2 to X100S, from X-Pro1 to X-T1… I have sold them all (technically speaking I still have a X30, which belongs to my girlfriend). There are many reasons why I decided to do so. I still can’t seems to harvest all the greatness of Fujifilm RAW files, and the fact that new lenses are getting bigger and heavier were a big let down to me as well. Of course there are many other things which brought me to this decision, but most of them are just my personal opinion. I’ll talk about those next time in a separate post. For now, the only Fujifilm camera left that I might still be shooting with will be the X30.

Gears aside, I’m glad that I’d been shooting more frequent than the year before. Almost every weekend or every other weekend I’m out to shoot, to learn more about my camera, to practice more about what I have read from books or forum and to see things and visualize them in different perspective. Perhaps I’d planned too many projects with too little time to complete them. Anyway, I managed to complete a couple of small projects like the “50 Shots with my Zeiss Planar” and “Goodbye 74 to 80 Commonwealth Drive”. The “to do” list is still pretty long, and I’ll see what can be done in the year of 2016 to materialize them.

The year of 2015 has been a fruitful year in terms of traveling and photography. I managed to cover Japan (Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe and Nara), Hong Kong and Cambodia (Phnom Penh), and I’m glad that I managed to grab some shots that I like from these trips. It’s always nice to be able to travel to some foreign places, it feels refreshing and gets you excited and wanted to just go out all the time to look, see, experience and shoot.

So what’s there for 2016? For a start, I’m planning to revamp my flickr account, though I’m not too sure how to do it, I’ll just try and see if I can keep them organized better. Blog post will continue over here, and I’m actually planning to shoot lesser for 2016. I’m toying the idea of revisiting my archive of images and relook into some of the forgotten gems and process them all over again. I have not been improving much in terms of post processing, hence I would certainly hope I can do something about it in 2016. Photo project wise, I’ll be downsizing and only be selecting a few projects that I’m really keen to work on. And last but not least, a lot of money has been spent on gears in 2015, so for 2016, I would like to spend more on developing my skills instead. I’ll probably grab some useful books or attend some workshops, we’ll see how everything unfolds. Besides that, hopefully I can embark on a solo trip as well for next year.

Gear wise, I don’t think there will be any major changes moving forward. It’s likely that I’ll grab a camera to replace my X-T1 as a AF-driven system alongside my Leica M System. Perhaps adding a film camera body if I can get something cheap to play with? Lens wise, at most I can foresee is getting a 28mm lens or “upgrading” one or two lenses in my current line-up. Otherwise, nothing much that I can think of for now. Oh well, we all know how the G.A.S. strikes out of nowhere, no one will be able to predict what camera you will be holding next anyway.

All in all, 2015 has been a pretty good year for me in terms of photography. I learnt a lot, get to know a lot of new friends and fellow photogs, get to explore more places and above all, get to take some nice pictures that I’m happy with. Hopefully 2016 will be another great year ahead for me and my photography. Till then, Happy New Year.