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© 1984-2019 Dave Wilson
All Rights Reserved

19
Dec
2020

Best of 2020




Given that we have only 12 days left in this rather bizarre year, the time has come for me to review my rather smaller than usual collection of images and pick some favourites. With the pandemic occupying 9 months of the year and shutting down most of the events I would normally be attending, I’ve shot very much less than usual – my Lightroom catalog has grown by only 8400 exposures this year compared to 22,000 last year – but I still managed to find a dozen frames that are either good, significant or both. Of these, 3 were taken before any of us had an idea of what “social distancing” was, and the remainder were created after the middle of March when everything in Texas started shutting down.

Here are my selections, in chronological order.

In January, I had the pleasure of photographing the dress rehearsal of Anything Goes, performed by the Dripping Springs High School theatre department last night. It was a fantastic production that went on to win several Austin area high school theater awards.
The last social photography I did this year was a photo walk in mid-February when I got a chance to play with my new fisheye lens while walking around downtown Austin. This old tressle bridge can be found on 3rd Street in downtown Austin, one block north of the new Central Library.
This image was taken on the same mid-February photo talk as the monochrome image above. It’s an aerial view of downtown Austin, Texas with the redeveloped Seaholm Power Plant and new Central Library in the foreground. I’ve only flown my drone a few times this year but I still very much enjoy the results.
After a month of lockdown and no photography, I decided that macros at the local flower farm would be a good idea. Armed with a shiny new set of extension tubes, Drew and I spent a couple of mornings at Nutty Brown Farm searching for insects. This image shows the head of a Widow Skimmer dragonfly (Libellula luctuosa) that was kind enough to stay still for the time it took me to get some sharp frames.
This image was taken later in May, also at Nutty Brown Farm, and forms one of a series of three images of a vintage tractor found in one of the farm’s fields. The images were taken from my drone and each offers a different perspective on the tractor.
The pandemic caused Cameron’s summer break from university to start earlier and last longer than expected. It was nice to have him home for a few months, though, and he let me take some headshots to experiment with low key lighting setups. This was taken in our house in May.
This is a rather more abstract portrait of Cameron and his guitar taken late in June.
While I didn’t do a great deal of photography outside the home this year, I did manage to do some socially distanced portraits for friend Hope Green. We spent a couple of hours in downtown Dripping Springs in July and got some lovely pictures.
Another form of photography which you can do without too much likelihood of ending up in a crowd is astrophotography. I’ve spent a couple of evenings this year out at Pedernales Falls State Park after dark shooting stars. This image was taken in late August and represents my first attempt at star trails.
I had only a single visit to Circuit o the Americas in 2020. That was in early October when the owner of this excellent 1998 Benetton B198 Formula 1 car hired me to take pictures as he took part in a track day. Social distancing was no problem at all that day – I literally had the whole track loop road to myself.
Needless to say, I’ve done practically no travel this year. The only exceptions were a 3 day trip to Amarillo to meet Nikki’s mum (it’s about half way between our respective homes) and a Thanksgiving trip to Kansas to see Cameron. The Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo offered some great photo opportunities.
We stopped in Oklahoma City on our journey up to Kansas in November and made a visit to the Oklahoma City National Memorial which offers an amazingly moving, reflective and tranquil remembrance to the 168 people who lost their lives in and around the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building at 9:02 in the morning on April 19th, 1995.


Tagged - favourites


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