Saw this over at Hannah’s and decided I had to do it.

1. What did you do in 2008 that you’d never done before? I spent a weekend in Nova Scotia with a bunch of women I’d never met before. And I watch all seven seasons of Buffy (in about seven weeks) and all five seasons of Angel (in about eight weeks).

2. Did you keep your new years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year? I don’t make resolutions. I figure you make lifestyle changes when you’re ready, and that rarely synchronizes with a new year. I think this year was the first year I thought about goals, and I kinda liked it.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? A number of coworkers did, but no real close family. Unless I’m forgetting someone (I can be a real ass that way). (Hannah did, but she’s not close, being in Nova Scotia and all.)

4. Did anyone close to you die? No, not this year. Thank goodness.

5. What countries did you visit? So what’s with the plural in this question? Makes me feel all inadequate with Cuba, even though I thought it was a pretty sweet year for travel.

6. What would you like to have in 2009 that you lacked in 2008? Sleep.

7. What date(s) from 2008 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? Probably January 12, 2008, the date of my best friend’s goodbye party and something else unbloggable. Or maybe my son’s birthday. Not many days stood out all on their own.
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? Getting this website up, and keeping shooting. Or watching all seven seasons of Buffy in seven weeks.

9. What was your biggest failure? I didn’t see my brother’s family very much, and I didn’t even realize it until Christmas.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury? Nothing major, a cold here, a stomach bug there, a neck spasm here, a back spasm there, the usual…

11. What was the best thing you bought? I’d love to say the D700 but I’m still feeling some ambivalence about that.

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration? My son has taken to spontaneously changing the toilet paper when the holder runs out. If it weren’t for him, the toilet paper would remain forever on the counter.

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed? Tony Clement’s when he said that doctors working at InSite were unethical.

14. Where did most of your money go? The house we moved into in August.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about? A family member securing stable, affordable, decent housing. And photography.

16. What song(s) will always remind you of 2008? The Buffy theme song. Or maybe the Angel theme song since it’s unlike I’ll ever watch that series again, and I will most definitely watch Buffy over and over.

17. Compared to this time last year, you are… A buffyhead.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of? Belly dancing. It’s just so good for me physically and mentally. And volunteering — but at this point in my life, that would require an eight-day week.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of? Overall, I’m pretty happy with the things I’ve been doing. I’d kind of like a lot less sleeping three to a bed, but at I’m ok with that choice.

20. How will you be spending Christmas? Spent it with my family. Christmas Eve at our house with the in-law, then Christmas afternoon and my birthday (Boxing Day) at my parents’ place with my siblings and their families. A very nice time.

21. Did you fall in love in 2008? Yes, first with Angel in seasons one and two of Buffy, then more so with Spike in seasons five, six, and seven.

23. How many one-night stands? Well, I had a few in my dreams, mostly with Spike, but that would probably not count as a one-night stand then, would it?

24. What was your favorite TV program? Buffy.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year? Why yes, there are a few: Angelus, Warren, Caleb…

26. What was the best book you read? Ack! All the good books I keep thinking of (Shutterbabe, the Harry Potter series, 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa) I actually read in 2007. Oh wait! The Time Traveller’s Wife. Now THAT’s a book. And I read it in 2008 (barely).

27. What was your greatest musical discovery? Girl Talk. There were other bands and songs I discovered and drove my husband nuts with how much I played on repeat, but Girl Talk felt like a real discovery for me.

28. What did you want and get? To sell a print of one of my photographs. And speaking of which, look what just arrived in my inbox tonight:

That’s my photo in Mad’s living room. I can’t believe how good it looks! (I’m not sure the small file here really does it justice — the big one she sent looks like a virtual frame generator it looks so good.) Thanks, Mad!

29. What was your favorite film of this year? I have to change this one to favourite dvd, since I didn’t watch many movies. The answer is – what else? – Buffy.

30. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you? I went to my brother’s house and ate vegetarian chili and carrot cake with most of my family. I turned32. (Heh, my fingers just slipped and I accidentally typed 21 – paging Dr. Freud!)

31. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? I wish Buffy and Spike had had a more real relationship, and before the end of season six.

32. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2008? Some people have a personal fashion concept? That changes by the year? My personal fashion concept does not change from year to year. Here are my fashion guidelines: Comfort above all else. If an item is especially comfortable, wear it until it literally falls off. And whenever possible, wear brown.

33. What kept you sane? My husband, since my best friend is on the other side of the world, and we have nobody nearby to call on for help. Him, or Buffy.

34. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most? Spike.

35. What political issue stirred you the most? Probably the whole InSite thing.

36. Who did you miss? My best friend. And Mad.

37. Who was the best new person you met? At the risk of sounding like a kiss-ass, my boss.

38. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2008: I’ve been learning a lot about compassion this year, or at least trying to.

39. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:

“When things get rough
He just hides behind his Buffy
Now look, he’s getting huffy
‘Cause he knows that I know
She clings,
She’s needy
She’s also really greedy
She never–
His eyes are beady
This is my verse,
Hello? She– “

(So who can identify the song and singer I just quoted?)

I sure know how to live it up on a Saturday night. I spent most of last night poring over the flash photography tips on this site. Everyone knows about Strobist, which I also like (I loved his interview with Rembrandt a while back), but I need a more basic education right now, and planetneil provides it.

I also spent considerable time discovering the down side of having a brilliant new monitor: I’m becoming a pixel peeper! And my pixels aren’t measuring up. For one thing, I discovered that some of the pictures from my new camera have horrible noise in the shadows, even at low ISOs.

During my obsessive research about the D700, I learned that Nikon’s RAW converter, Capture NX2 sometimes gets better results than Adobe Lightroom on Nikon RAW files. Luckily, Nikon thoughtfully provided a 60-day trial of Capture NX2 with my camera (I’m being sarcastic, since the price tag on the full software is about $200 – couldn’t they just throw it in when you buy a crazy expensive camera???). Anyways, I opened up some of the troublesome files in Capture NX2, and sure enough they’re better. It seems like Lightroom tried to lighten the shadow areas, which introduced noise, whereas Capture NX2 left those areas darker, as I intended, but still with some detail and very little noise. Unfortunately, now that I’m so familiar with Lightroom, Capture’s interface is just confusing and frustrating.

As well, when I produced jpgs from the files in Capture NX2, I discovered they’re much darker and have less detail when viewed through my Windows explorer and web browsers than they do in Capture, which kind of negates the whole thing. See how a new monitor can drive you crazy? Or maybe it’s just me.

* * *

Other things I’m thinking about:

I can’t get Alec Soth’s NIAGARA out of my mind. It started when I kept seeing quotes from him all over the place, quotes that really spoke to me. I wondered who was this Alec Soth (I’m horribly ignorant about contemporary photographers)? (Answer: established Magnum photographer.) When I went through the first few photos of NIAGARA, I thought I had it sussed out: a study of cheap motels around Niagara Falls. But then we see couples, love letters full of creases, a soaked and muddy newspaper, and we go into the hotel rooms. And the series becomes a meditation on our culture’s ideas of love and its end. I think it’s my first experience of a series of images with all kinds of different subjects, individually, but a single theme or statement, collectively.

JM Colberg mentioned a while back that he’d like to see fewer typologies in 2009, among other things. Given that I’ve only worked on one typology (Parking Meters in Lunenburg), and it was only for an afternoon, I think I still have some exploring to do on that front. But Soth’s NIAGARA has really started me thinking about other ways of working.

* * *

A few weeks ago, David duChemin suggested developing a plan for 2009. And I always do what David says — well, except for calibrating my monitor. I only did that last weekend because my pictures looked overexposed on the new one.

At the start of 2008, I decided to start a website from which to sell my prints and raise money for charity. My passion for the medium exploded, and I found myself just hoping the momentum would keep up for just a bit longer. Whenever I started to feel discouraged, I just told myself to never mind, just keep shooting. No matter what, keep shooting. Now here I am at the end of the year, and the momentum hasn’t really slowed. I do alternate between extremes of optimism and my work totally sucks so what’s the point negativity, but I just to observe those shifts, and keep shooting.

For 2009, I have a few more specific goals. I may not have a hardcore plan, but I have a vision and a direction. I want to focus on more project-oriented work, and I have lots of ideas. I just need to start putting them into action. I also want to learn how to use my new SB-900 to balance flash with ambient light.

Putting my ideas for projects into action will require that I get over myself and my analysis paralysis. I’m starting to wonder if I read Susan Sontag’s On Photography and Roland Barthe’s Camera Lucida way too early in my explorations of the medium, and it’s just fucked me up. Which is funny, because I can’t actually remember anything specific from either of those books. Maybe that makes it even more dangerous for me; I’ve just adopted the ideas wholesale with no awareness of where they came from. The only reason I’m suspicious is because I watched part of this video last night, and I recognized a lot of Sontag’s ideas in many of my own hang-ups.

One of my ideas is to photograph some of my neighbours in their homes. I’d like to find some who are the original owners of their50s-built house, to see what things have remained from that era and what have been replaced. It might also be interesting to photograph other neighbours, like the university students in their rentals, or the few younger families around to contrast the different demographics. This project could also help me get to know our neighbours, which is something I’m not particularly good at. This project would also be well-shot in winter, since I can shoot it indoors, and the lower-angled winter sun could be nice if my neighbours have windows like mine.

Ok, I think that’s enough for a Sunday morning…

This morning I woke up to find an email from JPG magazine: it is shutting down on January 5, 2009. This makes me really sad, because they published some great photography (even if they never published any of my pictures *sniff*). In particular, Jill Coleman’s work takes my breath away. 15 of her pictures are also posted here (that link will likely only work for a few days). Reed Young was another photographer I discovered through JPG. In fact, his photo essay on “Las Pajas and the Lucky Haitians” in the Dominican Republic was the reason I bought 1) the last issue of the magazine and 2) my new flash (again, that second link will probably only work for a few days – check them out while you still can).

On the bright side, I guess it’s good that nobody took me up on the offer of free subscriptions to JPG.