I got a lot of presents this year, many of them photography related. In case you can’t read the titles in the picture above they are (along with my initial reaction):

The Art of the Photograph. Somewhat disappointed with this. I must have put it on my amazon.com wish list a long time ago. A quick browse through it suggests that it won’t tell me much that I don’t already know.

Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2Tb. The hard drive on my laptop is running out of space – mostly because of the large numbers of pictures on it. I haven’t yet used this drive as I need to figure out how you transfer the pictures while still keeping Lightroom working.

Intuos Pen and Touch Small Tablet. The trackpad on my laptop has been acting up for a while so I started to use a mouse. Unfortunately the mouse is now no longer working reliably so I thought I’d try something different. I’ve always found masking to be difficult with a mouse and hope that this will make it easier. I installed the tablet without difficulty (apart from not being able to register as the site won’t take any of the serial numbers and software download codes appearing on the box. Still have to sort that out). It took a while to get used to it but so far so good.

Fotodiox Lens Mount Adapter – Olympus OM to Sony NEX. I bought an Olympus OM2n a while back and thought I’d get an adapter to allow me to use the 50mm f1.8 Zuiko that came with it on my NEX.

“Walker Evans – American Photographs”. Walker Evans is a photographer that I greatly admire. I had a book about him but it was destroyed in a flood at our house a few years ago. It was big and heavy and difficult to hold so I didn’t replace it. I thought I’d replace it with this one.

“Jay Meisel – It’s Not About the F-stop”. A while back someone bought me “Light, Gesture, and Color (Voices That Matter)” by Jay Meisel as a present. I liked it a lot and put this one on my wish list. I like this one too.

“Glass, Brass and Chrome. The American 35mm Miniature Camera” by Kalton C. Lahue and Joe A. Bailey. This one surprised me. It doesn’t look like much, but I’m really enjoying it. I’ve read more than half of it already. I won’t say any more as I’ll probably do a post exclusively on the book at some point.