2024 Best Photographs of the Year
As we arrive in the new year, it’s time to take a look back and offer to you my best photos of 2024. Or probably more correctly, the favorite images I took in 2024.
This year is dominated by the Bald Eagle; not a huge surprise given that there’s a known eagle hang out about 5 minutes from the house and some days that location feels like cheating (my record for most eagles in view at once: 23). All 12 images are bird images, there’s no landscape work that made the cut this year. This isn’t surprising to me, since I did very little last year. We’ll see if that changes in 2025.
2024 was an off year for me for various reasons, but when I look at the results, the number of images is down but I’m generally quite happy with the quality. I do hope to grab the camera more in the coming year, and work more on subjects other than birds — but bird photography continues to be the work that brings me the most joy and the least stress, so it’s not going away.
2024 was the year I started making a major change to my image processing workflow: I have migrated my library of images from LightRoom Classic to Lightroom (mobile/cloud version). A primary reason to ‘finally’ make this shift is a growing wish to be able to work with and edit images on whatever device I’m using, rather than having to go downstairs to the desktop machine in my office. Doing the selection and exporting of these images is one of the first non-trivial projects I’ve done in Lightroom and it went well. I’ll talk more about this change down the road when I feel I have useful things to say, but the last time I evaluated Lightroom (cloud/mobile), about 3 years ago, I decided against migrating because I felt there were too many features missing, and this time, I felt I could make the shift without significant compromise. But a significant aspect of that is that I know I need to create a new set of processes based on how Lightroom wants to do things, and not just try to wedge my long-time workflow habits from Classic into this new system. This is about reinventing my workflow and habits and muscle memory, not just do the same old thing in a new tool.
And, I should note, some of the decision to move tools is to make me re-think all my workflow habits and figure out what works and how to take advantage of these tools — I’ve felt for a while my processing has stagnated, and it’s time to tear it all apart and see if I can become a better photographer through reinvention.
I know some of you will react in horror at the thought of blowing it all up and rebuilding it, but I believe sometimes, the best way to move forward is to blow it all up and figure out how to build a new thing out of the pieces. Big chunks of my workflow are now 15+ years old, and to be blunt, while they are comfortable things to use, I’m not convinced they’re really the best way to do things any more.
Here’s hoping you had a good 2024 year with the camera, and 2025 is even better for you.
I have been publishing annual collections like this since 2007; if you want to see previous years, you can do so here.
