For those of you who know about this project, you know that it’s mostly a photographic journal of my year. I don’t really work on themes or use the project to work on a specific subject matter, I typically post an image that documents something I did that day, something that happened, or just something I found interesting, and the photos I picked as my favorites reflect that. I may not consider them all some amazing work of art, but they may have meaning for me in some other way.

So here’s a glimpse of my 2011 in photos. Hope you enjoy!

Friday January 7, 2011. If you remember anything about January 2011, it might be that is snowed like absolutely crazy. I took this photo just before embarking on a 30 mile journey that took me about 4 hours to complete.

Saturday January 15, 2011. We made it to a few Danbury Whaler hockey games during the season and this was my attempt at taking a less obvious photo of a hockey game.

Thursday January 20, 2011. This is Lucy.

Friday January 21, 2011. The forecast was calling for a snow storm, and sure enough I woke up to pretty heavy snow fall. Not wanting to be deterred, I stuck to my plan and drove up to Vermont to go skiing. I was richly rewarded with absolutely excellent conditions and a practically empty mountain.

Friday February 4, 2011. This photo just makes me laugh. I took it from my car, and the deer stuck around long enough for me to pull up, grab my camera, switch the lens, but as soon as I rolled the window down and lifted the camera up, he turned around and trotted away. Perfect.

Friday February 18, 2011. Margot and I having dinner at Eataly in NYC after a day of walking around and going to the Museum of Natural History. A great way to spend a day!

Thursday March 31, 2011. I just like this photo of Margot

Sunday April 24, 2011. I bought a bird feeder this year and at the times I remembered to fill it, I was able to get some great bird photos!

Saturday May 7, 2011. This is Rosy. She was also excited about my new bird feeder, and while she could probably hear the birds right outside the door, she was unable to reach them despite her best efforts

Wednesday May 11, 2011. I love seeing these things close up.

Sunday May 22, 2011. After about 10 years of going to school part time, I finally graduated.

Friday May 27, 2011. Any time we bring a suitcase up from the basement, Rosy feels the need to sit on it. We like to think that it’s her way of trying to keep us home, but I think she just likes to sit on things.

Sunday May 29, 2011. Much like the cobblers children who have no shoes, Margot and I have almost no photos of us together. So while we were on vacation, Margot always made it a point to tell me to set the camera up and get some photos of us.

Wednesday June 1, 2011. A photo from the resort we stayed at in the Dominican Republic.

Friday June 3, 2011. On the last day of our vacation, our day on the beach was cut short by a rain storm. It looked pretty ominous rolling in.

Sunday June 12, 2011. I love this photo of Margot and Lucy

Thursday July 7, 2011. This barn is in a the parking lot of a popular restaurant in Danbury. As you can see in the photo, the barn looks pretty unstable and it’s full of junk, including a couple cars that have probably been there for a couple of decades, but they leave it standing despite having a need for the additional parking space.

Thursday July 14, 2011. Our backyard is anything but scenic, but given some great sunset lighting and some creative composition you can get a decent photo.

Tuesday July 19, 2011. One of Lucy’s most favorite places is inside her tunnel.

Friday August 5, 2011. One of my favorite places to walk around and take photos in is Fairfield Hills in Newtown. I like it so much, that I often feel like I’ve photographed everything worthwhile in the place. So when I’m able to take a different look at something there, it makes me happy.

Wednesday August 17, 2011. I took this during a walk around Tarrywile Park in Danbury. Tarrywile is another location I often find myself in with a camera, so it’s a place I find difficult to come away from with new photos. However I really liked this one.

Tuesday August 23, 2011. I was really happy when I took this photo. I pass by this building every day, and I came up with the concept of this photo weeks (months?) before I actually stopped to take it. Until one day when the light was right, I had a few extra minutes, and the photo came out just like I had envisioned. Love it when a plan comes together!

Thursday September 1, 2011. This is another photo from Tarrywile park.

Tuesday September 6, 2011. Margot and I went up to Maine for a few days in September. The weather wasn’t terrific most of the time we were there, so there wasn’t much opportunity for great photos of sprawling landscapes with amazing light or anything like that, so during a walk along the shore I decided to focus on small snippets of the landscape instead. This is one of those photos.

Tuesday September 6, 2011. Another photo from Maine, this one in Bar Harbor. As the sun was setting behind me it was putting some great light on these boats in the harbor.

Thursday September 9, 2011. Margot and I braved the weather forecast and the ominous clouds and went kayaking in Acadia Park. Luckily we didn’t get rained on, and had a nice relaxing run around Jordan Pond.

Wednesday September 14, 2011. Theres an irony in this photo… it’s a greenhouse, that is completely overgrown on the outside with green “things”, but it’s empty inside.

Saturday September 17, 2011. Yale Bowl!

Monday September 19, 2011. Coming home to find my diploma in the mail really solidified that I was actually, truly, finished. It was a welcome sight.

Saturday October 29, 2011. Margot and I in Tarrywile. This was the morning of the huge snowstorm we got in October. It was nice out that morning, so we decided to take advantage and go for a walk.

Saturday October 29, 2011. Snow in October, turned out to be a lot of it!

Thursday November 3, 2011. These cranes were set up to submerge this huge tank at night, so I took the opportunity to get a photo of it while I had the chance.

Sunday November 6, 2011. Little by little I’ve been hiking sections of the Appalachian Trail in Connecticut with my family. We make it a lot more fun than it probably sounds.

Saturday November 26, 2011. I got to celebrate my Grandmother’s 90th birthday with her. What’s better than that?

Tuesday December 6, 2011. Our cats are pretty good with the tree and mostly leave it alone, but here you can see Rosy’s curiosity getting the best of her.

Tuesday December 6, 2011. Here’s Lucy, she’s awesome.

Wednesday December 14, 2011. For my birthday, I went into NYC with a couple of buddies, and our first stop was the 9/11 Memorial. This is a photo of the Freedom Tower I took in reflection of another structure.

Saturday December 17, 2011. Since Margot and I have birthdays just a few days apart, I got us a gift we could both enjoy.

Saturday December 31, 2011. A toast to a great 2011, and hopefully an even better 2012.

The transition to 2011 marks the 5th year that I’ve maintained my Daily Photo project. These days it’s not so much a daily photo as it is a photo every few days, but I still do my best to keep up with it.

Below are a few of my favorites from 2010. Hope you enjoy!

Hope you enjoy. As always, click on any photo below to see it larger.

Full-frame vs. Circular fisheye lenses
Nearly all SLR users are familiar with fisheye lenses, but many may not realize that over the years, they’ve been split into two categories:

• Fisheye lenses
  These lenses give a definite curved look to straight lines, with their pronounced barrel distortion. But even used on a full-frame camera (or a traditional 35mm film camera), they cover the entire frame, corner to corner, with a diagonal angle of view of 180 degrees. Traditionally, these ultra-wide lenses have been around 15mm or 16mm in focal length.
• Circular Fisheye lenses
  These are much more rare in today’s digital SLR world, but have been used for decades with traditional 35mm film SLRs.
  Circular fisheye lenses (such as the EF 8-15mm f/4L USM shot at 8mm on the full frame EOS 5D Mark II camera, above) capture a 180-degree angle of view in every dimension, creating a literal ‘circle’ of an image in the center of the frame. Note that for this effect, a full frame sensor camera is necessary. These lenses have even shorter focal lengths (around 7~8mm), and produce a small circular image in the center of the frame, surrounded by black, unexposed area on the outer areas of the frame. Like any fisheye lens, they certainly bend straight lines… but unlike the “full-frame” type, they generate an image whose outer edges are circular, and cover a 180-degree angle of view in every dimension, not just diagonally.

That alone would make this lens interesting, but what is even more interesting is this lens also offers a traditional fisheye effect on cameras with smaller sensors (also called “cropped sensors”). Traditional fisheye lenses made for full frame cameras typically are pretty unexciting on small sensor cameras because these cameras don’t “use” the whole lens. Some manufacturers make fisheye lenses specifically for small sensor cameras, but these lenses do not work on full-frame sensor cameras. Now with this new lens from Canon, photographers like myself that have both types of cameras are able to get a fisheye effect with just one lens. VERY cool.

If you’re looking to find out more about this lens, check out this article on Canon’s Digital Learning Center or you can get more information about it on Canon’s website.

Here are a couple images of the lens.

In my opinion, fisheye lenses can offer a very unique perspective to certain scenes, but it’s easy to overuse it. I tend to look for scenes with symmetry that I can accentuate with the distortion. It’s a great tool to have in your camera bag because it does something none of my other lenses do, but I tend to use it sparingly. I have the original 15mm Fisheye lens; here are a few images I’ve taken with it:

Canon is expecting to ship this lens in January 2011, so look for it then!

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Some photos from the day below – hope you enjoy!

Tim