Hey everybody, Zig here once again. I’m wishing you all a happy holiday season and a merry new year as we make our way into 2019.

This is a great time to look back at the year behind us and review how we’ve changed in both style and performance. I’ll be sharing a few photos I’ve taken this year (chronologically), a year which started with me receiving my Nikkor 105mm f2.8 macro lens!

To start things off, I wanted to share one of the first photos I took with my macro lens;

This is a photo of a completely out-of-focus jar of paintbrushes I had drying on my bookshelf. I spent a lot of the first few months of the year shooting things within arms-reach in my room since it was so easy to find simple subjects to play around with. These paintbrushes were also very important to me because I had very recently completed an introductory drawing and painting class at the New York Academy of Art. I learned quite a bit about the process of compositing a painting and also created something I was proud of and was able to hang on my kitchen wall!

This second photo is a bit more planned and processed and I think it definitely has inspired a ton of my photography this year;

This is a photograph I took on my very first outing to New York City with my new macro lens. I spent most of that day photographing everything that felt even a little bit industrial or grungy; metal scaffolding, the sidewalks, building corners, and so much more. I walked away with this as one of my favorite shots of that day, I think what I love most about this photo in particular isn’t the color that I added in post, but the texture! The rust and chipped paint is so crisp in the focused section and I just love it. It makes me want to go back to this specific part of the city with a tripod and recreate this kind of photo with focus stacking to get more of the main subject in focus!

I credit these next photos with getting me interested in floral photography more deeply than I had before.

Although they may have all been taken on different days, these floral shots are some of my favorites and show some style development when it comes to my floral photography. Color and composition are something I’m always improving, but I feel like I’ve made a lot of progress this year. It’s not something I can practice in every season, but I’m looking forward to Spring and Summer to build an even bigger catalog of flower photos.

Finally, I’d like to leave you with one final shot that I’d like to use a benchmark for myself moving forward into 2019;

I took this photograph of some metal fencing on the High Line in NYC during a group photowalk at the PDN PhotoPlus Expo earlier this year. I got to participate in a fantastic group activity alongside a fairly large group of other macro photographers and I had a blast! It’s one of my photography highlights of the year and I definitely look forward to working alongside more photographers in 2019! I definitely feel like all of the work I did this year led up to me taking a shot like this and I really want to focus harder on preparing and executing on photos more deliberately next year. It’s one of the main things I’ll be working on, as well as several other things like focus stacking and videography.

Phew! Going over my old photos is definitely a little bit stressful, but it’s absolutely eye-opening to physically see the progress I’ve made personally and professionally this year. I’m very excited for what I’ll be doing in 2019 and I can’t wait to kick start the year with the release of the first episode of my upcoming podcast in late January: The Shutter Button Podcast. If you’re interested in learning about my approach to different professional experiences, then I invite you to listen to the show as it starts to get released next year, but in the meantime, I look forward to hearing about everyone’s 2019 plans!

Anyway, that’s all for now. I hope you all get to enjoy the holiday season and I’m wishing everyone a smooth transition into 2019.

All the best,

Zig