Some of My Best Shots of the Year

After Mike accused me of being lazy for not posting and suggesting that if I’d run out of ideas that I sit down for 20 minutes and think about what I posted on this blog during the year, I decided to revert to an earlier strategy, looking through pictures I’ve posted this year and reposting the “best” of them. That ought to be easy enough, right?

In retrospect, it wasn’t nearly as easy as I thought. Couldn’t do it. Couldn’t even manage to pick the “best” in a single category, much less pick the best shot of the year. I’d forgotten how many images I post in a single year, particularly since I cut back on reading poetry. I suspect I couldn’t even define what I mean by “best.” It’s some amorphous category influenced by how I feel about where I took the picture, whether it’s the first picture I’ve ever gotten of a particular “bird,” whether it’s a bird I’ve spent years trying to track down, and, finally, by some aesthetic photographic principles (though I’m pretty sure I couldn’t articulate those principles, either). In the end, I was only able to narrow it down to 23 images.

Here’s my favorite landscape,

Grand Tetons

though I still think it needs to be seen on a 27” Cinema display to appreciate how special The Grand Tetons really are. I suspect that this is my favorite because this summer was the first time I’ve ever seen The Grand Tetons.

Pictures of flowers may have been the first photographs I ever posted on this blog; they’ve now become secondary but I still liked these two shots. This Photoshopped Calendula is a favorite,

Calendula

because of its geometric shape. It suggests a mandala to me, and I’m fond of them.

However, the simple wild rose is almost invariably my favorite flower shot,

wild rose

especially in all it’s simplicity. If there’s an archetypal flower, this would get my vote.

One thought on “Some of My Best Shots of the Year”

  1. wonderful retrospective…especially if (like me) you visit this blog here and there and sometimes miss a particular set of photos. Well done. I knew you weren’t lazy….just stalled on the runway waiting for ok from the control tower.

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