Like probably many of our viewers here on UHH, I routinely prepare an annual wall calendar with photos from the past year, destined for our close family members. I thought it might be interesting to do a brief series on UHH covering the calendars I generated during this past decade - as well as to showcase for once some recently taken photos. The general idea in these calendars is diversity instead of a single theme, thus I am not showing a nicely complementary selection of photos but rather one or several pictures from the various places we have visited in the past year.

Most of the viewers that have noticed some of my previous posts probably realized that I am one of the world's slowest guys when it comes to processing the images from a trip. This is definitely true and due to several reasons: I produce too many images, I am slow in processing as I am way-too-much of a perfectionist (in desires, but alas not in execution), and we probably travel too much which means high production and not sufficient time for processing. I also decided a long time ago that I was going to process all my images strictly in chronological order, otherwise if I start cherry-picking, the photos of some trips would never get processed. I have almost completed the processing of photos taken during trips in 2016, a couple more albums and I can move into 2017.

But notwithstanding my resolve to work strictly chronologically, I do make a small exception: Since I produce the calendar covering the previous year's trips, I do have to scan through the annual take and select likely candidates and process these. Since I thus already worked on these particular photos, I decided to set up a series of Annual Interim albums on my photo-website, to present at least some photos until the final albums are completed. I have just completed that task for the years 2017-2020 for which I have not yet issued any albums.
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For this album series here on UHH, I will start with the last year and then work in reverse. 2020 was for us, like for most if not all of our friends here at UHH, a dismal year for traveling. Luckily, we had a booking to attend a family wedding in early February (02/02/2020 at 2.00 pm to be exact - you get the drift ...) in London, which gave us a chance to spend a couple of weeks with our daughter's family over there as well. On our return flight from London to Seattle, we made a one-week stop-over in Iceland. I didn't even shoot any photos in London, as January/February isn't exactly a stellar time for photography in London and we were to return again in the spring, but I took quite a number of photos in Iceland, since this was our first visit to that country in the winter. So I was able to include a few photos from Iceland in the 2021 calendar. For those of you that tagged along on my recently completed series on "Summer in Iceland" here at UHH, this might give you a tiny idea of how fantastic the country presented itself in winter. - Eventually, some years down the road, I should be able to present my album with a broader picture on "Winter in Iceland".

For the rest of the year, we roamed the countryside in our vicinity, looking for photo opportunities. Even though we moved to our present location 13 years ago, we actually never had much time to explore our intermediate neighborhood and this pandemic gave us a welcome and much-needed push. The pictures in this calendar were taken in just 2 counties in the uppermost northwestern corner of Washington state: Whatcom county where we live and Skagit county just south of us. This quest of collecting a sufficiently diverse set of images from our neighborhood was actually a real blessing as it revealed to us maybe not overwhelming sights but nevertheless many very pleasant corners of this land. I do hope that you will enjoy the series for the past decade and particularly these first pictures taken in 2020.

As the pictures in the calendar number slightly below 20, I have added a few other images from the year that were in the selection process but didn't make the cut. They are marked accordingly.

A second set of pictures will follow tomorrow to complete the year 2020. As I have not yet properly worked on the rest of the images for these topics, I have not yet prepared my customary maps, but if you are curious, a couple of clicks on Google or Google Map will easily identify the locations for you.

Thanks for visiting, I recommend viewing the downloads and look forward to your comments and questions.

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