Favorite Photos of 2022
Here are my favorite images for 2022. Overall, 2022 was a good year for photography, definitely an improvement over crazy “move to Washington” 2021, and my collection grew with more images and better images overall. I also made the shift from shooting Fuji mirrorless cameras to the Sony A7IV and have zero regrets doing so.
It’s also the year where “this year I’m going to do more photography with the iPhone” actually happened, and while none of those made this collection as my favorites, there are definitely some pretty good ones in the mix. I’m still sorting out the workflow for managing iPhone images in my overall workflow, and right now, what seems to be working best is to process them on the iPad — using the Photos app, for now, but I expect to shift to a different tool at some point — and then export high res jpegs for import into Lightroom Classic for cataloging and keywording. Not perfect but not onerous, either.
Ten of the shots are bird images, and only two landscape, and I think that properly matches the relative time spent in both creation forms. Landscape photography mostly needs me to be able to give it more time than I’ve been able to, and to spend time understanding how best to leverage the Sony and iPhone for it. That said, I look at that image of the Queen Anne’s Lace, which was pretty literally a five minute experimental hand held sidetrack while shooting another image, and I find I’m really appreciating how the Sony gear handled it. Only two images came from Fujifilm cameras this year, the hummingbird and the chickadee in the nest box. I think that says more about the Sony re-igniting my enthusiasm to pull out the camera than it does about anything relative between the two camera platforms. I still think the fuji platform is wonderful for someone wanting to do bird photography on a relative budget, as it’s much less expensive to get a good set of gear with it than with the Sony platform.
2023 photography? Carry forward, go out more, shoot more, and experiment more. Beyond that, just play it by ear. I’m going to try to schedule a couple of trips, but nothing firm yet, and I’m starting to consider a photo workshop if I find the right one at the right time. Overall, though, I feel like what my photography needs most is more attention from me than the last couple of years have allowed. I’m really looking forward to finding ways to make that happen.
