2024: It's a Wrap

Here we go again with another installment of what I like to call my annual "put something up on the blog to justify its presence" tradition/rite/exercise-in-introspection. I have to say, this year I had a hard time finding patterns and common threads across the photos I took. It's not for a lack of content; between Lightroom Classic and Apple Photos, which is where I very messily store the entirety of my photographic output, there are about 11,000 photos from the last year. But there just weren't that many big, overarching themes uniting them into a cohesive body of work. Not that there really needs to be; my photos are kind of like a sketchbook or a journal, providing cues that trigger memories about my life. But for the purposes of this kind of exercise, sometimes it's nice to have a unifying thread.

With that somewhat lackluster preamble, here are some of my favorite photos of 2024.

from above

I love taking pictures from the air, whether with a drone, or while gazing out the window seat of an airplane. I only took my drone up a handful of times in the past year, though. But I did get to travel a few times and of course I tried to get myself in a window seat as often as possible.

I shot these on the way home from a trip to Stockholm last fall. We had a stop in Reykjavik, and I had fun trying to capture details of the otherworldly Icelandic landscape as abstract-ish black and whites.

 

Nature and wildlife

This year, I rented a couple of different telephoto lenses that let me dabble in some wildlife photography, and I really enjoyed it, especially during our excellent trip to Costa Rica. We spent a little time in the cloud forest, where there should have been opportunities to photograph the resplendent quetzal, but luck wasn’t with us. I had to make do with egrets, anhingas, three-toed sloths, macaws and toucans.

Back in the untamed wilderness of New York City, I managed to capture some other impressive avian specimens.

This year, I also picked up a Moment Macro (T-Series) lens for my iPhone. I’m still kind of blown away by what that thing allows you to do, especially when paired with an already great mobile camera system.

 

the city

NYC always features prominently in my favorite images, and this year was no different. Looking through this group of images, I am noticing that most of them are by the waterfront - maybe there’s a theme after all!

A vertical panorama of 1 WTC, shot from Jersey City, composed of maybe 6 images? It’s very tall.

Fujifilm X-T4 | SIGMA 100-400mm F5-6.3 DG DN OS

 

People

I didn’t really make that many portraits last year, outside of a very fun family portrait session with a newborn; and some images of my friend Kaylah for her pop-up shop.

 

Land and Sea

At first, I was going to classify this group as landscapes, but once again, I realized that almost all of them are of the ocean, or some other body of water. Look at that, a through-line continues to emerge…

 

the moon

I tried something new this year: photographing our closest celestial neighbor, the moon. I rented a super telephoto lens (from lensrentals.com, naturally) specifically to try to capture the partial lunar eclipse in September. I spent a good bit of time poking around in Photopills, figuring out where and what time to shoot from, and learned about azimuths and hyperfocal distances. That said, I still have much to learn and am looking forward to doing more of this type of photography going forward.

 

So those are some of the standout images I made in 2024, which turns out to have had an aquatic/celestial thread running through it.

My goal for 2025 is to try and push myself outside of my comfort zone some more, by trying some more new techniques and finding more unifying threads in my photography. 🥳