It’s that time of the year again, and I have some tips for you if you’re a part time photographer wanting to minimize your taxes..

I’m glad to say I filed my taxes last weekend. It took me several days to put everything together, but it’s good to be done and start worrying about another year. As a reminder, here are couple of articles I wrote last year that may help you with your taxes for 2009 and maybe even 2010 if you plan ahead. I updated those articles recently, and I hope you find them useful. Again, feel free to leave a comment to these articles if you have a tax question, of send me an email and I’ll be happy to help.

Tax Tips for Part-Time Photographers

Sales Tax Tips For Photographers in California

The auction for one of my prints that I wrote about earlier is over, and I’m happy to report that the print was sold to Dylin from Madison, WI (who goes by Dylin Holden on Flickr), who donated his winning bid, $200, to a great charity organization Shelter Box, that has three separate operational centers in and around Haiti to help distribute assistance to the estimated one million people left homeless by the devastating 12 January earthquake.

The devastation from the earthquake is beyond what I can imagine, as is the pain of those who lost their loved ones and their property in this terrible disaster. Right now the relief efforts are challenged by the crime of looting, and robbery, to say nothing about the lack of basic supplies, so the disaster is far from being over. Reading the reports, this all reminds me of the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. To see some of the terrifying photos from the disaster, click here.

Thanks to all those who bid in the auction and especial thanks goes to Dylin who won the bid, for his generosity in this great cause. While we can’t all go to Haiti and help those in need, we can at least donate funds and other things to those who can.

To see other photos that are still being auctioned as part of the similar effort, click here.

I’m auctioning a 16×20 print of this photo I took at Pebble Beach back in 2007 to help the relief efforts for Haiti earthquake with all the proceeds donated to charity of your choice. The bidding began, and will end at 11.59pm on Sunday, January 17th.

For details, click here.

The year barely started, and I’m already slacking on one of my resolutions. Human nature, I suppose.

Thanks to all those who contributed to my “Best of 2009″ post and shared their thoughts on which shot they liked the best. Now that I got 2009 behind me, it’s time to look into 2010, and set some specific photography-related goals and decide where I want to be a year from now. I’ve got a bunch, and I don’t want to share all of them, but I’ll share a few main ones. It’ll be good to look back at these goals at the end of the year and see how much has been accomplished. Here are few of the things I’d like to accomplish this year, in a random order.

1. Reorganize and redesign my portfolio web-site. I was going to finally select a new web-site platform and create an online portfolio, but just a couple of days ago I learned that Zenfolio, the service I use to sell my prints, has undergone a major upgrade, and I think now has all I need to get the job done.
2. Build portfolio in three areas – landscape/nature, architecture and abstract. I am going to stay more focused on these subjects this year, as year develops and my goal is to have 20 images in each section that I am happy with. Last year I’ve shot all kinds of types of photography. This year I’ll specialize more.
3. Complete a photo essay. I’d like to complete a photo project that will be good enough for a photos essay consisting of 10-15 images. I have several ideas in mind what that will be.
4. Write a new blog post every week. I think writing about photography is a good way to improve. Photography as a medium is hard topic to write about, but my goal would be to write a substantive post once a week.
5. Grow my photography business. I’d like to shoot more assignments, I’d like to sell more prints, I’d like to have larger presence online and I’d like to be profitable this year.

All these goals have a long list of to-do items as I brainstorm, but as I write the ideas down, it makes me look forward to the upcoming year and where I’ll take my photography.

Before I outline some of the goals I have for my photography for 2010, I thought I’d share with you some of my favorite images from 2009. As I share these, you can see what kind of things I found myself photographing during this past year.

It’s been an interesting year for me. In terms of subject matter, I photographed just about everything there is to photograph – landscapes, seascape, portraits, street, urban, architecture, night photography, sports, macro, street and even firedancers. A lot of it came as a result of attending photowalks and meetups that tend to focus on different things, but overall I wanted to spend some time exploring various styles of photography to see which direction I want to go next. It was almost a self-discovery for me, and in the process, I’ve learned a lot, both about photography and myself. With that, let’s go ahead and jump in to cover some of my favorite pictures from the last year. They’ll be presented in the order I took them.

1. Rising Storm and the Tree

For some reason I was home early from work that day, and seeing some powerful clouds outside, I rushed to the hills behind my house to see if I can catch some clouds. We don’t get storms very often in this area of California, but I managed to catch one just on time.

2. The Alien Shore – in Memory of Dennis Cyncor-McMillan

The sad background behind this image is that I took this photo on the night Dennis Cyncor-McMillan, a local high school student, drowned at the nearby beach while partying with some friends late at night. This photo represented his last sunset. His family was in contact with me since the accident, and they’ve used this image during Dennis’ memorial service. This was perhaps the most meaningful image.

3. Arriving in the Motherland

I wanted to take this photo for years now. We finally made the track back to Moscow where I introduced our son Maksim to his extended family and to his Motherland. He had a blast hanging out at the Red Square.

4. Loneliness of Leadership

Not only did I get to see Michael Phelps swim live this last year, I was also lucky to photograph him and get this image of him, all alone, as usual, ahead of everyone else in this race.

5. Alpen glow on Mount Timpanogos

While visiting in Utah, I got up early for sunrise one morning to be treated with beautiful mountain light on Mt Timpanogos of Wasatch Range. Standing there all alone, I left one with nature as time seemed to disappear.

6. Links into the Past

Sometimes fog can present some of the best photographic opportunities. Wanting to catch a new view of these remains of Davenport Pier, I hiked down there in this bad weather and with the help of the long exposure captured the mood of that cold August morning.

7. Nimitz Street

Mare Island is one of the more favorite locations of mine where I photographed all of last year. An old shipyard played one of the key roles in World War II and walking there at night I kept trying to imagine what a different place that have been 65 years ago.

8. Her First Smile

I will of course remember year 2009 mostly for new addition to our growing family, our daughter Nadya, who was born back in October. Of all the hundreds of photos I have taken of her, this one is my favorite. She’s truly an angel.

9. Feeling Dizzy

Last year I’ve shot a lot of architecture, and this is something I’d like to continue doing. This image is a nice reminder of why I love Embarcadero Center in San Francisco.

10. Changing Light Over Garrapata Beach

My last nature shoot of the year took place at the Garrapata Beach at Big Sur, where I witnessed perhaps the most dramatic light I have seen in that part of California.

Bonus Photo – Jordan and Jen

In May I had the honor to be a photographer at my friends’ wedding out in North Carolina. Beautiful location and a beautiful couple.

I’d love to hear what are some of your favorite images of mine – from this group or those that I’ve shared elsewhere.

We hosted my wife’s family this week for Thanksgiving break. On Saturday we headed down to Santa Cruz Mountains for a brief hike in the redwoods forest, and I decided to try something new for me.

Redwood trees are rather hard to photograph, and just about every time I tried I walked away with no usable exposures. Because of how tall they are, and because of how these trees create huge shadows for themselves to sustain moist environment for their roots, they’re typically back lit and create a technical nightmare for a photographer. In other words, the trunks are in the shadow, and everything else around them are highlights. The redwood groves are typically a part of the biggest forest, so it’s hard to find them in a situation where trunks are lit up.

So this time I decided I wanted to try a new technique I believe landscape photographer William Neill first made famous with his portfolio The Impressions of Light, where he tried to imitate the style of impressionism explored by Monet and others, but with his camera. To see how he does it, check out the article here.

I think these types of images look the best when printed large on canvas, and I’m planning on doing that in the future. However, I do like how this one turned out and how the light helped me shape this image.

Either way, a walk in a redwood forest is always good for the soul, whether or not I walk away with any usable frames.

I’ve announced it elsewhere on Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, but in case you missed it, I’m a proud father yet again as our second child, this time a girl, was born to us earlier this week on Monday. All is well with her and the mother, and you can see a little lengthier write up here.

Here is today’s photo.

This is my first image that I processed almost entirely in Lightroom 3 Beta that was released today (basic sharpening was done in Photoshop). I do like new import dialog – very intuitive, and I absolutely love how vignette works now. Noise Reduction isn’t as impressive as some people tout it to be, so I’m still sticking with the Noise Ninja, but so far, I do like the LR3 and will play with it more in the next few days.

I just got home from the photowalk in Palo Alto that my buddy Thomas Hawk invited me to a while back. The photowalk was organized by Trevor Carpenter (pleasure to meet you, man) and 30+ photographers showed up on this warm day to take pictures together and socialize afterward. The timing of the photowalk couldn’t be more perfect. As we’re about to have baby, I had a long week wrapping up all my projects at work all week long, and it was nice to spend some time away from my desk simply taking pictures.

We mostly shot neon tonight since it gets dark early these days. I have not shot much of neon at all, so it was a nice change of genre for me, and there is not a better person to learn from than Thomas (check out his neon sets here – amazing work). Palo Alto has some beautiful old signs on University Avenue.

I’ll post more photos as I process them in the coming days.

Downtown San Jose, CA