Maëlick in the North

Toy Photography in Northern Finland, Sweden and Norway

Photography Diary – Ending of 2021

Another four months have passed since my last post. There hasn’t been much to share since. Or at least, not much that I want to share now. But the new year is always a time for me to reflect on the past year and set up goals for the year to come. And this year I want to do this by picking my photo for the Flickr Your Best Shot contest.

At the end of every year, I pick one photo that is dear to me. It’s not so much about picking my best photo but the one that best represents the past year. Sometimes picking the photo is easy and straightforward as I know which photo stood out to me throughout the year. Sometimes it can be a more challenging and time-demanding task.

But this year has been different.

Picking my best photo

2021 has been the least productive photographic year since 2015, at least quantity-wise. In particular, the second half of the year has been mostly devoid of toy photography. This could potentially make the task easier due to a lower number of candidates. But looking back at the photos I made during the first half of the year, quality-wise, the first half-year feels almost as unproductive as the second half.

It’s not that my photos are bad or worse than previous years. I took many photos I would have loved to pick as my best of the year if I had taken them a year earlier. But the truth is, at this current point in time, I don’t want most of them to represent where I am now from a creative and artistic point of view. While there are still many photos from the first half of 2021 that I do love, they are not the kind of images I want to create in 2022.

There are however a handful of photos that might hint at what I would like to achieve in 2022. They don’t necessarily represent the photos I want to create, but they give a sense of direction about where I want to go.

2022, the year of change

The year to come will need to be the year of change. At the time of writing this, while I have some ideas of what I want to change, I can’t tell with certainty what the change(s) will look like.

The photo I eventually picked is from the Stuck in Plastic Autumn workshop. In many ways, it’s not my most impressive photo of the year, but it was taken at a time when I was questioning myself and trying to figure out where to go. While I am still trying to figure this out, taking this picture has been a stepping stone towards finding a direction.

Where will this direction lead? Where will I end up? I guess I’ll only be able to find the answer later this year.

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