2021 Year in Review

What the hell did I do this year?

Don't know if this is just me or not, but Covid is just becoming one big, undefinable year.

I keep getting parts of 2020 mixed up with 2021, and hope I'm not the only one

Luckily, I organize my Lightroom catalogue by date, which makes it very easy to look back and see when and what I've done.

I'm going to keep this simple and go month by month and talk about the interesting things that happened in each month if any:

January

What a boring month this was. I went out a total of 3 times and all of them were just around the house. Wonder why I didn’t go out? Right… Ontario's COVID-19 cases were up around 4000 new cases a day and right now in 2022 they're up around 10,000 new cases a day. Looks like it's going to be another slow month this year as well.

February

Kind of a lame month as well.

It did snow and I had the opportunity to break out the macro kit and get some snowflake images.

Also had a young hawk visit the backyard.

Mini story:

My family has a bird feeder in the backyard and mostly we just get sparrows, but some mornings we get a number of song birds. Chickadees, robins, cardinals, and house finches, but we've also seen the hawks have taken notice. I've only seen them catch a bird in the backyard once and I didn't actually see it. I was making lunch when I heard a commotion outside and when I went to look, one of the bushes was shaking. Thinking it was one of the local cats I opened the door to chase it away (as I've done in the past) and just as I opened the back door this big hawk stood up and looked at me, its mouth full of feathers. A moment later it took off and flew to the large walnut tree a few doors down, taking its kill with it.

This photo is not of that hawk.

This hawk calmly flew up and landed on the fence and then all the sparrows flew away. The hawk then looked around and had what I can only describe as a WTF look on its face: "where did all the food go, it was just here, maybe I should have listened to mom during the hunting lesson."

It sat around for a couple on minutes, enough time for me to get this image of it before flying off.

March

Toronto kind of had a lame winter, or at least I did. Had snow at he beginning of the month but my trips at the end of the month look like an early spring.

A couple of trips to the water front to find duck on ice, some birds in the backyard, and then some more birds at the beach. No snow in those last folders…

April

April I was trying to get back into my non-photography related work and this took up most of my time but think March was when I really started to get into bird photography. I've always loved it but think this was the month when I really started to look at it seriously.

May

This is around the time I decided to try YouTube again. I had made and posted a handful of vlog-style photo walks and a couple of shorts but I was just kind of going out, recording things and hoping I had enough to make a video when I got around to editing.

I tried a few different kinds of videos this month including an unboxing that I never posted because it's absolute shit. Now there are many reasons for this, but the one I'm going with is that there were three houses being renovated in my area; one was right next door to me. I could not get clean audio during the day, and if I wanted to record myself or do a voice over, I had to do it after 7:00pm. I did however get some very nice shots of Forget-me-nots and Bleeding Heart flowers that my mother had planted.

June

COVID cases are way down, under 100 a day, I also have a couple of contract jobs again, one of which is painting a condo unit downtown. Downtown + evening + low case counts + me feeling safe being around people = street photography!

I did that for several nights and walked a different street on the way home taking some photos, I also met up with some friends a few times.

July

July was the month I finally upgraded my lens. After almost 10 years of using Canon's 18-55mm and 55-250mm lenses. I upgraded to Canon's 24-105mm F4 version 2 and the Tamron 100-400mm F 4.5-6.3. Why these lens? Simply put, the reviews were good and they were in the budget. I would love to have gotten a 24-70 2.8 but it was almost the full price of both these lenses.

August

I made a couple of Youtube videos. They're not the best, but I finished them in a timely manner. I wish I could say same about the other projects I had going on at the time, but no… just these ones.

Went on a couple of photo walks with local groups and discovered that my Tamron lens is back focusing. So while fixing that problem, I decided to check all my lenses and do what ever micro adjustment was needed in camera. Hoping everything works out and any new problems are just user error.

September and October

I'm grouping these two months together since I was going out several times a week to look for salmon. Speaking of salmon, you can read that story here: "Salmon Hunt 2021"

But here are some of the highlight photos!

November

During my bike trips out to look for salmon I became disappointed with how much garbage I kept finding along the trail. I eventually ended up cleaning areas I came across. I tried on several occasions to record myself picking up trash, but it didn’t make for a very interesting story or content. I would have had to set up a camera and tripod every time I found something, or leave the gear to set up for a B-roll shot of me biking down the path. I ended up going to a community clean up event hosted my 'Don't Mess With The Don' and took some photos of what they brought out of the river.

I have decided to primarily focus on nature photography and I'm trying to figure out a way to incorporate cleaning nature into videos or just making the video a standalone like 'Bike with me while I pick up trash' or something like that.

But like my name says 'FunGuy' I'm going to photograph whatever I have fun doing

December

I finally got a job this month and I don't think it's anything to brag about. I'm officially an Uber bike currier, but it’s the first decent paying job I've has since Covid started so I took advantage of the nice weather and focused on this job over photography. That being said, I still got some nice bird shots and started a new video for the YouTube channel.

This pretty much sums up my 2021

I was hoping to do more but I was also splitting my time between 3 different projects each month.

Going full time as a YouTuber didn't work out, although I didn't try that hard, but I did learn some things, like you can't just go out and hope to come back with enough material to edit a full video.

I did get this website up! Again, it's not quite what I want it to be, but it will grow as I do.

So here's to what I hope will be a productive 2022!

Edit - as I'm finishing this post, Ontario is headed back into lockdown. What a great start this year is having…