Top 10 from 2014

It's fast becoming a custom among photographers to reflect on the year that has just passed and look back at the photographs they've taken. It's a great exercise to really help a creative take stock of where they were, and how they developed over those 12 months. I did this last year by sharing my favourite 5 photographs, which took me a long time to find as I'd taken thousands of photographs. Some were at weddings, some were at home with the kids and others were for fun and personal projects.

This year however things are slightly different for me. The saying goes (and I preach it more than most) that gear doesn't matter when it comes to photography. But 2014 saw me moving into the world of Mirrorless cameras which are inherently different to the 'traditional' DSLR. I personally invested good money in an Olympus camera and a set of prime lenses, which for me was a departure from my setup of the years previous as I would usually have been spotted with my trusted and much loved 70-200mm f/2.8 much of the time. 2014 was the year of the 17mm (34mm field of view) prime lens though.

One thing I would say is that my own photographs of my children would easily have made all the top 10 in this gallery in 2014, but seeing as I don't share photographs of them online, I've gone for photographs of other things. The beauty of the Olympus (sorry if this is sounding like an advert) is that it is so small, so light and so convenient that it's just like a point and shoot, yet it has all of the manual controls and all of the necassary components to make photographs that stand toe-to-toe with DSLR RAW files (as I hope is demonstrated below in the 10 photographs I've chosen to share with you)

So, as much as gear doesn't matter, my photographs in 2014 were sure to take on a whole different feel because of the equipment I ended up using for much of it.

I'll get to sharing my favourites shortly, but i also want to share some numbers too:

Total photographs taken in 2014: 26,797
Taken with Canon DSLR: 14,208 (53%)
Taken with Olympus MFT: 12,589 (46.9%)

What these numbers don't really illustrate though is that I take far fewer shots with the Olympus per shoot. My keeper rate is higher thanks to the EVF: it's hard to accidentally over or under expose an image, even in a pressure situation, because what you're seeing is the resulting image. Further more it just doesn't lend itself to a machine gun approach. So, that means that even though just under 50% of my total photographs for 2014 were with the Olympus, you could still say I used it more regularly, but just took fewer frames with it.

Anyway, let's move on. If you've read all this way, thank you very much for considering interesting enough to do so. If you've read this far and thought it was all trifle, sorry...here are the photographs :D :

What these numbers don't take into account though is that for each wedding I'm shooting upwards of 1500 - 2000 photographs. I'm also shooting far, far fewer frames with the Olympus (with a higher keeper rate too thanks to the Electronic Viewfinder). So, in summary I have been out shooting and using the Olympus more than the Canon, but when I have the Canon in my hands I tend to make more frames in a shorter period.

So, as you can imagine my photographs and my approach have all been adapted and changed over the past 12 months. Whilst this has meant my photographs have ended up looking different to 2013 in terms of composition, post processing etc, it has also allowed me to enjoy my photography far more as well. I'll probably expand on exactly why that is in a week or so right here on the blog, so subscribe if you're interested to hear more and find out why.

For now though, here are my favourite 10 photographs from 2014. These are a combination of photographs I've made for myself and there are a couple of client photographs in here too. If you're interested to see my best 10 photographs for clients, check out my wedding website - RammellPhotography.com