After reading Leica Camera's final blog post of the year, "Thank You For a Great 2010!", I thought I'd end 2010 on a what was a personal high note for me during the year: photographs from the photo-walk I enjoyed the most in 2010.
It was a friday after work on the 21st May 2010. England heading into summer (summer in England is only 2 weeks long ;), with the sun being kind to photographers and staying up enough after 5pm to make street photography something you can actually really enjoy. Winter it's dark by 3:30pm, so you either go out and shoot during your lunch hour (and starve — I have given this serious thought on occasion) or wait until the weekend. Of course you then have to keep your fingers crossed that it doesn't rain on the weekend. You see where I'm going with this? This is one of the reasons I haven't done much photography lately.
2010 will go down for me as quite possibly one of my most significant years on planet Earth. Not just because of photography and this blog, but for many other reasons too. I got to see Guns 'n Roses for the second time in my life, and this time right against the front barrier to have Axl singing "mired in denial and so afraid" from the song Madagascar ♫ , right to me. There I was, shaking my head at him. hehe. To hear Chinese Democracy live again after so many years, was for me, something really special. I know this isn't a blog about music or Guns 'n Roses, but I'd like to reflect a little on what went on in my life behind all the photo-blog posts. I'm not going to tell you everything of course. Getting to see Europe live was even more meaningful to me, because hey, I still listen to them after all these years, and it was a first for me.
I really enjoyed experiencing my first Apple store grand opening. You can read all about my experience in the post titled "The Largest Apple Store in the World Grand Opening". I attended two courses at the Leica Akademie at their Mayfair store in London. They were great, so thank you to Leica for running them and to Brett and Will Cheung RFPS for passing on their hard earned and valuable knowledge. You can read about the introductory M9 course I attended, given by Brett, in my post titled "Leica M9 Akademie Day (Camden Town Remains)".
Now onto the lowlights of 2010. I've thought long and hard about the merits of sharing this next piece of information, but enough time has passed and the good that may come from it, far out-weighs the bad. You only have to look at Lance Armstrong, to see what can be achieved – not suggesting I could achieve what Lance has, of course. On the 7th December 2010 I was diagnosed with Cancer. It was a huge shock, and I was devastated to learn how advanced it is. But without going into detail, it looks like I will bounce back. You simply can't describe the emotions that come with the highs and lows of the first few weeks of tests and scans and waiting for the results, that ultimately inform you of your fate. That time is almost over, and soon I'll be starting treatment. I'm yet to decide whether to photograph any of it, never mind share it. I'm not Lance Armstrong, so probably not. I'm not going to turn this into a Cancer blog. I won't pester you to donate to
Cancer Research UK. But I may share photos I take while helping out at marathons and other events that help raise the awareness of Cancer. If you follow
me on Twitter, you might hear more though.
And if you're still reading, congrats! Because the quitters won't read about how I plan to relaunch this blog in 2011 as Leicable.com. When? I don't know. Why? See above and I've outgrown the
Posterous feature set. It all takes time though, and I have a lot of other important stuff on the go too. So there will still be blog posts on here, that's for sure!
Imsticking.com has gone from humble beginnings where it wasn't even a photo-blog with each post getting around 90 views. Looking back at the viewer stats in Posterous it's no surprise to me that the 2 most visited posts had nothing to do with me but everything to do with some else's success (and maybe google's SEO algorithm). To go from around 90 views a post to now getting over 20,000 views a post, leaves me feeling rather blessed. So thank you very much for reading, or just looking at the pictures. In particular order the most read posts were:
Have a great holiday season, and thank you very much for following my photo-blog.
*this is not true
