Prior to getting married, I was a "professional" photographer of sorts, although I didn't use that term as I shot weddings and events for a photography studio on the southwest side and even before that I was a photo editor of the college newspaper and did a little bit of shooting in high school. Anyway, I fell out of it and lost my skill set but, back in 2006 with digital, I started to come back and now, of course, I am quite obsessed (if I must admit it) and I spend much free time trying to improve my skills.
The three things that got me back into photography were travel, the grandkids and the ease of use of digital technology. I travel so much that I thought I should shoot all the things I was seeing as very few people have the honor of seeing so much of this country. While it is mostly city centers and office buildings, you can see a surprising amount of the country between meetings and driving from point to point, if you are aggressive about it. (Just ask one of out salespeople, if I have asked to do a 5 minute detour to stop here or there.) Of course, the grandkids (sorry, Lily, Clio and Eckhart) can't do anything that I don't want to photograph and with digital, you get the immediate feedback so that you can improve your skills if you pay attention to what you are doing.
Anyway, since I am not traveling (I hope) for the next month and since at this time of the year lots of "best of" lists come out, I thought I would post my subjective list of my top 20 best (non-family) shots stretching back from 2006 until last week. (Two shots from last month did make my top 20 best of list, bumping two older shots out of the list.)
This shot is from our Nuveen sabbatical trip to Europe (Nuveen used to give 6 weeks off after 15 years to take a sabbatical, an amazing benefit long since retired). We used that time to visit Nina in Paris where she was studying and continued on to Italy and other places in Europe. That is still our one and only trip to Europe and I would love to go back again. I loved Paris, Rome and London but Florence was the highlight of the trip. This shot was taken with my old Nikon D200 and I shot in jpeg back in those days as I was just picking up digital photography. Love that an old shot has hung in there to stay on the list.
