Last night, bored, I took out my cookie gun again and tried out a few of the transparencies I had made for it when I first constructed it.

When you go back through all of the photos that you took in 2008 it's hard to believe that it all came in one year. I got that sense when I was writing my last post on what I had learned and accomplished and I got that again this morning as I was scanning through my Flickr stream. I don't post everything that I take (they might have to sign me up to a super super heavy-usage account if I did) but I did have some hundreds of photos I did post. I slowed down near the end once I switched mostly to film and then there was that bad moment when my 30D died.

In my favourites from 2008 set I've lumped everything in from macros to landscapes to Strobist-style portrait sessions. Start from the bottom with this photo that I took just after New Years spent in Edmonton with my brother and his family (my Roy Arden moment)and it ends with this photo that coincidentally is another frozen landscape.

After several days of being snowed in (well, we were able to get out boxing day and onwards) it's been a useful time to reflect on how much I've learned and accomplished in 2008.

Around four years ago I had my first digital camera after not having a camera for maybe 15 years since a burglar stole my nice Minolta N2020. Granted, I didn't really use it that much but I should have.

Since getting back into photography my learning curve has been a steep climb with no apex in sight. Three years ago I was still dusting off the fundamentals I learned from my high school photography class. Two years ago I was contemplating actually making money. This year I made money and was published in a book and in two magazines. 2008 was also the year of the Strobist and my re-entry into the world of film.

Still snowed in since Tuesday we had a nice surprise when we noticed that the magnolia branch we had pruned from the property had begun to flower. A couple weeks ago we welcomed a friend of one of our neighbours to give us an expert's tour of the trees and plants on our new property. He showed us what to prune or leave alone and one of the things we took was a branch from the magnolia tree. We were told that if we put it in water, eventually it would flower. On Christmas Eve it began to bloom and by Christmas Day we had this nice magnolia bloom.

This is the time of year when Vancouver gets its annual dump of snowfall. Normally we get only liquid precipitation but at least once a year we get an epic blanket of white stuff that people are just not used to dealing with. So for some people out come the shovels and road-salt; and for me, I stay home and bundle up and try to shoehorn lights into a small place.

We're coming down to the end of the year and there'll be more than a few "year in photographs" lists coming up. Here is one of the better ones I came across last week.

View The year 2008 in photographs on Boston.com. I like this list because it shows the photos very large. There are some brutal photos in there as well but they are hidden behind "user-controlled blinders" if you don't want to see them.

Note #27 on the second page is a gorgeous landscape of Vancouver from earlier this month showing downtown (and the delta beyond) shrouded in fog.