2015: A Different Kind of Year-End Review.

Posted on January 3, 2016

Hi!

Um, I don’t really know where to start here. It’s been a little while. Let’s get the elephant in the room addressed right off the bat; I haven’t posted a photo of the day since May 5th, 2015. I realize I’ve kind of hung the readership out to dry a little bit, and I’m sorry about that. But you know what’s really really cool? The readership hasn’t abandoned the site (entirely). Over the last month, there have been about 200 views of the site (admittedly down from a high point of around 38,000 some time after my trip to Uganda), but that’s still awesome. Top places include the US, Russia, Brazil, Germany, and the UK this round; so that’s pretty cool! I’m glad that some of you still find this interesting.

There’s not much to report on my life in the last few months; I’ve been splitting my time between working full time as a service manager at a bike shop (awesome) and composing, also more or less full time (even more awesome). As a result of this, photography has by and large fallen by the wayside as the hours in the day slip away and I find less and less time and/or interesting things to take my camera out for.

A few interesting things happened; I was promoted at work from an assembler position to mechanic and then to the assistant service manager within a very short time span, so I figure I’m doing something right over there. I drove through Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Eastern Washington in September with my dad, David, and his parents, which was one of the highlights of the year (check the portfolio site for all the photos of this! The trip was unreal). My car died (RIP Hobbes 2003-2015, we knew ye torque converter well) and I bought a new one (my first new car!), I went on a few hikes and a whole lot of bike rides, and somewhere in the middle of all of this I just sort of stopped using my camera when the amount of time in the day started getting eaten up by work and the time for interesting things slowly disappeared. Such is life as an adult, right? I’ve tried to compensate for a few days here and there by taking photos with my cell phone camera, which is still an absolutely stellar camera, but it doesn’t really compare to the logistics and forethought of planning out and executing a shot I’ve had in mind for a long time.

But of the events that happened to me in 2015, really only one stands out as being particularly impactful (or even worth mentioning to me in this recap); Oakley passed away on July 12th following a week of increasingly declining health. Two days ago would have been his sixteenth birthday.  Those of you who have followed this photo blog since its inception will undoubtedly know that my dog meant the world to me; of all the things that may have had an impact on whether or not I had the drive to get up and take a photo every day, this was almost undoubtedly at the top of the list. I sort of lost the drive to really do anything creative in the months following Oakley’s death. I found solace in being alone a lot (again, a lot of deeply introspective solo bike rides) and I probably made a lot of people irate by shutting down instead of talking about my feelings, but that’s the way I deal with that stuff. I will always remember the love, laughter, comfort during dark times, and pure happiness Oakley gave me with absolutely no expectation of anything in return. After over fifteen years of friendship and brotherhood, the best way I can think of to mark this yearly closing tradition is to  dedicate it to my best friend.

With this in mind then, here is my single top photo of 2015.

I never gave my dog a proper eulogy of any sort, no formal writing on this site or the portfolio site, and I still think that will be something that comes in time and it’s not anything I intend on rushing. Until the appropriate words come to mind, I’ll lay the topic to rest for the time being.

So, I digress. In 2016 I’m keeping my goals quite simple and to the point, and here’s the shortlist:

1. I’m training for a triathlon in August.
2. I’m getting and keeping the photo of the day up and moving again. It’s time to resume.
3. I’m going to visit Iceland this year.
4. Bikes.

Simple. I like it. Last year I managed to ramble on for a long, long time about a whole bunch of photos, and this year I figured this will be kind of cool since you’ll have not seen quite a few of these photos until now.

Therefore, here’s a quick photo-recap of the Photo of the Day in a nutshell without the mindless filler, the endless photos of whatever random stupid thing I could find around the house to photograph at 1am, and the missing days. Here’s to 2016 and getting back on track to making this site active again, being creative, following my passions, enjoying the world more fully, and seeing life through a lens.