2024 Review & Analysis
14 January 2025
Motivated by Mike Chudley's video I thought it would be a fun idea to analyse the pictures I took last year, especially my favourites. For choosing those I sat down during the last days and looked through a total of about 4000 photos. Every time a photo made me stop for a moment, I assigned a colour label to it. Afterwards, I culled through the about 100 selected works and ended up with 77 favourites (not including any private images). An objective process? Hell no… But who cares :)
Since I'm refusing to put myself in one genre and engaged in nature as well as street-ish photography during 2024 I decided to split the review and analysis into those two areas. It also makes sense since not only the gear I used but also my approach varies between these two areas.
Street
I was astonished once I saw the number, but apparently, I was out doing street photography about 70 times during the last year. For some instances, it's a bit hard to say since some walks were a combination of nature and street while others were so short that I didn't count them as individual ones.
However, from those 70 walks, I marked 38 pictures as favourites for the last year. That means that during every second walk, I made a favourite picture. That sounds a bit high, though. Perhaps I should raise :)my standards in the future. But I'm still happy about the pictures. Even though some represent personal growth more than artistic quality. As I said: the choice was not objective. :)
When evaluating which cameras and lenses I used it was no surprise to me, that 29 of the 38 pictures I took with my Ricoh GR IIIx, which has an equivalent focal length of 40mm. A field of view I grew really fond of and it is also the camera & lens combination I chose for my OCOLOY challenge.
The remaining nine pictures I took with my Fujifilm X-S10 using a various set of lenses: one picture at 24mm (I wanted to try some wide angle street photography), four at 53mm, one at 85mm (quite surprising since I only got that lens in early December) and three pictures at 135mm (a focal length that really forces my to see the world different; and I like that). Except for the 24mm shot I only used prime lenses for my street work (I don't own a 24mm prime so I used a zoom lens fixed at that focal length; so practically also a prime). I prefer the fixed focal length for its creative restraint.
Due to my OCOLOY challenge the data for 2025 won't change that much since I will only be using my 40mm Ricoh GR IIIx for all street and documentary pictures.
Looking at the location of the picture it shows that 34 favourites I shot in my hometown while only four were in other locations. While it would correlate to the amount of walks, it does not align with the amount of pictures taken. In theory, there should be a few more favourites from other locations. When away I often fall into the habit of just capturing snapshots without a clear direction. While this sometimes creates nice memories it starts to annoy me since I know that I could have taken pictures I would prefer in the long run. Something to improve during 2025.
Analysing the content of the 38 images, 30 were taken during the day while eight were shot during the night. 25 pictures include people (in some way) while 13 don't. During 2025 I expect that the latter number could rise, though I will keep open in what I photograph. For four photos the specific light during the moment was necessary, but for most, it wasn't. Not really surprising since the weather wasn't very sunny during most times I was out. During this year I'm looking forward to experimenting more with light.
One last data point: Of the 38 pictures, 19 were edited in black and white and 19 in colour. I expect this to roughly stay the same.
I did most of my street photography during the first half of 2024 and since August I had quite a problem motivating myself to go out into the city. At the moment my motivation is picking up and at the same time, my expectations on the output of a street walk are lowering. That's a good sign. And after being out in the cold for four hours yesterday afternoon with just 12 taken pictures I'm still motivated to go out again. And that's a very good sign.
Nature
The other 39 images I would categorise more as nature shots. It is a wild mixture of landscape, woodland, flower/macro/close-up, firework, and astro. Since my motivation for street photography was dwindling during the second half of 2024 most of my nature favourites were from that time.
But nature photography is not a replacement for street for me. Counting it is not really possible, but I was out in the wild about 40 times last year. A number that I want to increase during this year. Even though my motivation for shooting in the city is picking up again. These walks resulted in a total of 39 favourite images during 2024. 39 from about 40 walks? Too high? Yeah… But again: who cares :)
Naturally, my most used camera was the Fujifilm X-S10 with 34 shots, while five were made with the Ricoh. Due to my OCOLOY challenge, I will use the Ricoh in more circumstances this year than last year which should mean, that during 2025 more of my favourite nature photos will be made with this little machine.
Inspecting the used focal lengths they are of course much more diverse than my prime-only approach in street photography. 10 favourites between 24mm to 35mm, 11 between roughly 40mm to 60mm, 6 somewhere above that and below 100mm, and 12 above 100mm (the XF90mm being responsible for half of them). Since I got myself a new telephoto lens in November I expect that I will shoot more at longer focal lengths. I wasn't too satisfied with the telephoto lens I had before and I'm looking forward to (re-)discovering these larger numbers.
Looking at the locations of my favorite shots it seems to be more than what I expected (compared to street). At "home" (roughly a radius of up to 15 minutes by bicycle) ten photos, from nearby (roughly a radius of 2 hours by train) there are nine favourites, and the largest amount of 20 pictures are from farther away. Since I intend to go out more into the woods and nature this year I expect that these numbers will differ a bit with more interesting work produced just a few kilometres away from where I live.
I don't give too much on perfect conditions. If I'm at a location I'll shoot and make the best of it. Whether it's a beautiful sunrise, perfect foggy conditions or "boring" midday sun I try to take pictures that I like. Therefore, it is not really surprising that 26 pictures were taken on overcast days or during midday sun. 11 photos were taken during sunrise or sunset and the remaining two at night.
Let's finish also this section with a comparison of colour vs. black & white. I'm not afraid of robbing a scenery of its colour (if it even had any, to begin with) and therefore it is not too astonishingly that 14 of my favourites are edited in black and white while the other 25 are in colour.
Closing Thoughts
Wow, that got much longer than I thought! If you read everything until here: congratulations and thank you!
You may wonder if it was worth the time to get all this data? Yes, but not in the way you might think. I truly enjoyed looking through all the pictures I took last year and remembering all those moments. In the end, getting the numbers was more of a side effect. Nevertheless, the analyses and outlook will hopefully help me develop my photography further in 2025.
If you're more interested in photos instead of numbers then I have something planned for you. I'm already working on two follow-up blog posts presenting my top five favourite street and nature shots with a bit of a back story.