Happy New Year !

Hullo Everyone :-) 

After a few weeks away from Blipping - I'm back, although things will be taking a slightly different format this next year ...

More of that in a sec though - first of all, I hope that you've all had a wonderful holiday period and I'd like to take this opportunity to wish you all the very best for the New Year, may your wishes be granted and may your resolutions be kept ;-)

Also, thank you to everyone who has left comments on the series that I did recently, I apologise for not having responded - and also I'm sorry that I may take some time to go back to respond to you all - but I am very grateful none-the-less !

Now, going back to what I was saying, a different format this year. 

Just before the end of last year - after my first 365 - I was thinking about what I had learned. 

In my first year I suffered from the bane of many photographers - G.A.S.*. I wanted to improve - and it seemed to me that I could improve by _getting_ new things. Occasionally I was right ( mostly with literature & courses - although a good tripod was also an excellent purchase ) - more often than not I was wrong - good lenses are great, but good framing is better. So at the end of a year I had amassed more than I could ever use, and realised that the improvements in my photography we all to do with the _practice_ that I had put in purely from trying out different things. So I pruned. And I pruned _a lot_ ... 

I'm pleased with the decisions that I made on what to keep and what to give up. I still have some funky things - infrared and ultraviolet cameras. Some old things - a few film cameras - family heirlooms and the like. And then one SLR ( Nikon Df ) and one mirrorless ( Fujifilm X-Pro2 **). 

What I did keep though was a good selection of old, manual focus lenses. I've adapters to convert these to fit both the Nikon and the Fuji, so the plan, for the foreseeable future at least, it to pick a lens a week from the shelf and work with it - not necessarily on only one camera ( or indeed, possibly on film ... ) and to spend some time learning and documenting it. I'm planning on starting this coming Sunday and changing the lens each subsequent Sunday. I'm not going to stick exclusively to classic lenses - working through _all_ of the lenses that I have, and when I run out - which won't be for some time ! - I'm going to choose the ones that _I_ like the least and sell them off on EBay and try something else out.

I intend to supplement the photos that I upload here with more elsewhere showing the more technical aspects of the lenses that I'm working with each week ( shots of the lens exterior, aperture blades and sharpness of focus ) - links to that will be included for those who care to follow them. I'll still try to participate in the occasional theme day ( Mono Monday etc. ) but occasionally limitations of the lens might prevent that ...

I hope that you'll enjoy this, and I really look forward to us all sharing  our images in 2019.

All the very, very best to you all.

Si

* Gear Acquisition Syndrome 
** I have to say the X-Pro2 is a dream, the hybrid viewfinder is amazing and when I found it, I knew from the outset that it would be an amazing tool.