2016: A (sort of) year in the (personal) life

Hello. I’m Adam Johnson and I don’t take enough photos of my family. There, I said it.

I blame my camera of course, for not making me pick it up enough between weddings. Of course it’s the camera’s fault. The poor defenseless little inanimate object is the reason for my failure.

“You must have SO MANY photos of your kids”… I hear at almost every wedding. Erm, no. I don’t know what it is, and I know I’m not the only photographer guilty of this, but I just don’t take enough photos of ordinary life as the year progresses. This year worse than ever. We take a lot on our iphones of little moments but iPhone photos don’t satisfy me. They annoy me. I’d never print an iPhone photo. Maybe I’ll change my mind when I get to experience the much improved camera on the latest iPhone but up to now, I just feel like phone photos are only good enough for phone screens and not much else. I probably need to get over that. Or take more photos with my ‘proper’ camera.

If you’re interested, for the last couple of years my ‘personal camera’ has been a Sony RX1R. That camera makes photos look so good, and I loved it. Until I started hating it. I found the focus system too slow, and after it missed one photo too many I just stopped picking it up and started giving it evil sideways glances. Eventually I sold it, then spent months agonising over what to replace it with, in the meantime taking virtually no photos of my family. Finally I bought the Olympus OM-D E-M5ii. I’ve been shooting with it now for about a month and it’s a joy to use – I’ve taken almost as many photos this month as I have in the previous six! But I don’t love it and I know I won’t put up with it forever. The colours, tones and image quality just aren’t amazing. And I demand amazing. I imagine I’ll have to replace it within a year, otherwise it’ll be getting those same evil sideways glances. But for now it’s helping me take photos of the people most important to me and that’s always a good thing. Plus it was less than half the price of every other camera I was looking at. I think I feel Leica calling me…

It’s true the camera doesn’t matter. In a way. A photo you take is better than a million you didn’t take. It’s true. And I’m really not that interested in technical stuff, but I know what I like in a photo. And here are 30 photos from 2016 that I really like, because I reeeeeeeeeeeeally like these little dudes. Sometimes they get the evil sideways glances too, but this is them at their wonderful best.

If you don’t take enough photos of your family either, then I’m encouraging you to pick up that camera, take it with you always, and use it. And teach your wife/husband/partner/dog to use it well enough that you’ll appear in a few photos throughout the year too.

Merry Christmas ya filthy animals. Eat all the mince pies, and I’ll see you in 2017!