When the weather is inclement, the photo opportunities are plentiful. We’ve all heard that. Some go storm chasing, others brave the summer heat to photograph a melting ice-cream cone. In winter, I like to go out at night when the flakes are coming down.

Incidentally, the temperatures are usually also fairly inclement. The last time I went out, it was no different.

We all have them, those photos that “don’t make the cut”. Whatever the reason is, you still held on to them, “just in case”. They can be those blurry shots of a family gathering, or a fluffball on a near-empty branch in the woods. For some reason we hold on to them.

Others simply never throw away any picture, in the hopes that one day a program will come by and create a master shot out them after all.

So, 2019 is gone. Never to be seen again. For some, the year would never end, for others, it went by in a blink. A blink just as tiny as the shutter speeds of the majority of my pictures. A little more than 6,400 pictures, totalling some 10 minutes of shutter time, which includes some long exposures of 30 seconds.

That’s a year in numbers of a photographer. Perhaps I should add the time spent on processing, but that is difficult to assess. What counts is that I still have pictures to post here on my blog, and that there are still people reading the said posts.

For years, I have tried to photograph the spirit of Christmas. But photography only goes so far. The most I could get were the Christmas lights. Those lights are great for cards and prints. However, they always seemed to end up a bit “flat”. Christmas trees in Holland were a very intimate affair. Tucked away inside the house or perhaps just in front of the front window, the best decorations towards the inside.

Here is our Christmas tree from 1980, doing my own developing and printing of the negatives in a simple darkroom. For now I also have to contend with the dust on the scan, let’s call is angel-dust in the spirit of Christmas.