Just A Man With A Camera

If you recall, one of my goals for the year was to complete a 52 week photo challenge.  One new photo per week, every week this year, and posted on my BlueSky page. The first month was a success and I managed to not fall off the wagon and get a post in every week. One down, eleven to go!  I decided that on the first Monday of every month I would would publish a post looking back at the previous months photos. 

January 3 2026

The first weekly image of the month and year was from the coolest Christmas gift I recieved this year. My lovely wife gave me an Instax Mini Evo and after Christmas I was itching to get out and try it out. The weather wasn't great which usually keeps me inside and hibernating, but I pushed myself to get in my car and go for a drive for an hour just to see what I ended up with. Of the 4 images I ended up printing, this was my favourite.  I like way the tree branches at the top frame the image and lead the eye down the cold snowy road. This was taken with an old expired pack of film we had kicking around the house so the colours were a little off, but I still like the way it turned out.

The second weeks photo was a shot I did for a local business owner for his companies Google page.  They recently had the front of the store renovated and needed some new advertising photos. We had a stretch of unusually warm days early this month so I took the oppourtunity to get a nice photo. The snow in the front was much more brown and dirty in the foreground, but I used Affinity Photo to clean it up a bit, and look nicer.  I'll be doing another one in the spring/summer when it's not so snowy.

My wife gets her nails done ever few weeks by at the salon down the street from our house. During a previous photoshoot, we found that her nails really lit up and glowed under this lighting configuration so we wanted to see how thiese would look.  The skull is there both to give her something to do with her hands and because it is chrome-like and reflective and we thought it would look good under this lighting.

January 24 2026

Taken during a week in Mexico, this lighthouse was visible from our resort and was calling me to photograph it. My wife and I couldn't find an opportunity to get very close to it, but I did notice what I thought was an interesting vantage point. We get part of the hotel pool, with a dividing line sepratinging it from the ocean, which leads the eye further to the lighthouse, and and then further into another shade of blue of the deeper further away water. The line of the hotel wall and pool edge also draws the eye through the image and points us to the lighthouse in the distance.

Another fantastic gift my wife gave me for Christmas was a set of two extension tubes. I sat down to test them with my Olympus 60mm macro lens, trying to get the most detail out of something tiny, so I poured out a pile of coffee beans and found myself spending a couple hours attempting to locate the most visually appealing cofee bean in the bunch. After taking a second to give my head a shake once I  realized I had been spending way too much time being judgmental about the asthetic qualities of beans, I sorted through what I had shot and settled on this one.  I was very impressed by just how much detail I was able to pull out of such a tiny object. Additionally, I was able to push the IBIS of the OM1 and get some really sharp photos shooting handheld.