My closest friends know that every year – typically at the end of October – I select 12 photographs I shot during the previous twelve months and stick them in a table calendar as a little Christmas gift. As part of the selection process, at the beginning of October I start reviewing the pictures I published on social media with the intention of narrowing down the best (or most meaningful) 15-20 shots before making the final call on which ones make the final cut. As you may have noticed, I have taken a few photographs since upgrading to the Fujifilm x-series cameras and therefore I have a lot of unprocessed pictures on my memory card that have not even been exported to my laptop.

The picture below is one of those. I shot it in Porto on Christmas Eve 2019. It was a foggy morning and I decided to go for a walk whilst waiting for my sister to get ready for breakfast. I actually took two pictures that morning as I was approaching the iconic Dom Luis I Bridge. On paper it had all the right ingredients to be an epic picture: the fog was rising and breaking through the bridge; a tram and a woman were also approaching, as well as a seagull was flying over the bridge. And guess what? I published that picture both here and on social media thinking that was a bloody good picture.

A couple of minutes later I decided to start crossing the bridge and take another photograph. I stopped. I pressed the shutter and then moved on. End of story.

As a matter of fact I actually forgot taking that picture at all until earlier this evening when I was browsing my memory card looking for any decent shot I may have taken and left behind. The original photograph was taken in colour with my old Fujifilm X-T20 (I have only recently upgraded to the X-T3) and subsequently edited in Lightroom using one of my own custom-made black and white presets.

Needless to say this one will feature my 2021 table calendar…