Photography Goals for 2020

Looking back at 2019, I've come a long way in my photography. In preparation for a landscape photography workshop in the spring of last year, I upgraded my whole system, changing from a high-end bridge camera (that I had actually been quite happy with) to an Olympus mirrorless system camera. There was a new camera environment to learn. Not only that, I had some serious post-processing learning curves to climb. 2018 had been my year for getting to grips with Photoshop Elements. 2019 saw me jumping into ON1 Photo Raw and learning a completely new bag of tricks.

Images for the 2020 Calendar

So what are my goals for 2020? I've put a family photo calendar together for the last 10 years or so and 2019 was no different, except that instead of it being a mix of family and landscape photos, the 2020 calendar was going to be without the family photos so that I could peddle it outside the immediate family. Struggling to know how to select from the thousands of images I took last year, I was finding that many of the pictures that I was most happy with were turning out to be abstracts, and so that's what the calendar turned out being; 12 abstract nature images, ranging from the side of a Swiss wooden chalet to a field of underwater corals.

Solitary Tree at Dusk // f8, 1/6 s, ISO 200

Over New Years we went down to Austria to spend time with friends in the mountains. I'd spotted a couple of details that I thought would make good abstract subjects and was reasonably happy with how they turned out, but flicking through my daughter's Instagram feed at the end of the day I noticed that she'd taken similar photos, but with a subtle difference. Where my snow crystals and ice bubbles were isolated, her photos put the same elements into their environmental context. All of a sudden, the subject had a lot more impact.

Snow Crystals // f7.1, 1/2000 s, ISO 200

 I was quite happy with this image until I saw Rhiannon's take on the same scene on her Instagram stream:

How it could have looked

Much more effective. You still have the detail of the beautiful crystals, but it puts them into context.
How much more effective would the bubbles in the next shot have been if I'd gone down lower and included some of the background scenery? Again what learned, as the Germans say...

Frozen Bubbles //f8, 1/60 s, ISO 1600

Catkins with Hoarfrost // f8, 1/200 s, ISO 1250

With the red-tinged catkins I find that the isolation works and I was really happy with this image, especially in the square crop. So sometimes isolation is great, other times a hint of context strengthens the image.

One of the need-to-work-on skills that has been percolating away at the back of my mind is finding decent foreground interest when using my UWA Leica 8-18 mm (16-36 mm FF equivalent). But what if I turn that on its head and try instead to find decent background interest for my details? I'm already good at finding those detail images, what if I work on embedding them in their wider environment? Sometimes out of focus is going to work, otherwise I might have to work on my focus-stacking skills.

So that's my photography goal for 2020. Working on providing environmental context for my detail shots. Oh, and finally getting a decent shot of the Milky Way.

What about you? What are your photographic goals for 2020?