I’m going to approach this year’s post a bit differently. I’m not going to complain about how Peter makes me do this every year, or how hard it is to choose my favorites, or the total agony involved with going through thousands of photos to get down to 10-ish. Nope, none of that. This year I’m going to get on with it.

In the last few years, I have started hearing Villanelle’s voice in my head yelling “Boring!” when I look at my photos. I decided this year, to start exploring some different routes to see if I could generate a little more excitement within myself for making photographs. I upgraded my iPhone after 5 years, and attended an online 3-day iphone photography conference. That was eye-opening. Who knew the iphone camera had changed so much? A lot of people apparently, as usual, I was last to jump on board. I then started toting my Fujifilm Instax camera around with me everywhere and found I liked those images as much, if not more, than the ones I created on my big camera. I also gave away many more prints than I kept, and made a bunch of new “2-minute friends” along the way. I rounded out the year with a 5-day online photography lecture series about the Multiple Exposure and Intentional Camera Movement technique. I followed this with a 2-hour lecture on how to process these images and more during post processing. It was this simple $40 investment that re-invigorated my enthusiasm for photography (and unfortunately, it gave me thousands of more images to consider and cull through. So, enough with the preamble. Here are my favorite 13 images of 2024 in no particular order.

This is not a particularly well conceived or executed image, but its one that makes me smile because it reminds me of the special experience I had with friends. The ability to ask a friend if she would partake by dressing up and participating, and without hesitation she said “Yes!” (I added the exclamation point, I can’t remember if she was that enthusiastic). Or her husband making us eclipse themed cocktails as we sat around for what felt like hours waiting (yes, I did know it was noon-day drinking), or her daughter making us signs to hold that said “Team Sun” and “Team Moon”. One of our photography gurus said that there were two reasons to make a photograph – you make them for others to see, or you make them for yourself to remember. This one was the latter.

We spent an amazing 5 days with an especially amazing photographer exploring all of his favorite places to photograph in the Highlands. He often would stop at places that I would just drive by. At one point he cajoled us when we didn’t want to get out of the car in the rain, “Come on, put your wide-angle lenses on and give it a try.” Dean introduced me to big moody sky photography, with small subjects and gave me a new sense of how to appreciate the dramatic landscape. If you’re interested in spending time with Dean, you can reach him through his website.

I seem to be having a renewed love affair with trees this year – or maybe its more accurate to say trees, and tree parts. This was another spot that Dean showed us. We went there on our first day in the area and were greeted with bright cloudless sunny skies. We went back the next, and had moody clouds. It really drove home why Dean gets so excited with conditions that would keep most people away.

I made this image using my infrared camera. Our friends Mark and Cat went there one afternoon and the road was full of people trying to get their photo in this famous filming location. We decided to go there the following morning at sunrise thinking there would be fewer people there to work around. We had the entire road to ourselves for almost an hour. I’m going to need a new strategy for early morning photography. It really is the best time for “people-free” images. It’s just so darn hard getting out of a warm bed to a cold room and a dark sky.

Some of my favorite places to use my Fuji Instax camera are ghost towns. For me the gritty, nostalgic sense of the place is better captured with a technically imperfect image. Twice a year Flickr hosts an instant camera “submission-thon”, called ‘RoidWeek and this fall I participated. It was interesting to see all the things people are doing with their instant cameras, and I was absolutely excited to get one of my photos selected for their Explore category. To see a few of my favorite Instax images click here.

This is another infrared image – a tree trunk, the side of a road, a boat ramp, and shallow water. Everything about this location and subject said “drive on, nothing to see here”. But I made Peter stop anyway, and for those of you who have been in a car with Peter, you know how hard it can be to make him stop….for anything…but Sonoran Hot Dogs, it seems. I walked around for a few minutes, took a shot with my iphone, looked at the back of the screen, and ran up the ramp to get my infrared camera. It’s an area I worked for over 15 minutes, and it still makes me smile to think about it.

During our 3 weeks in Montana this summer, we visited several ghost towns in the western part of the state. We both became fascinated with chairs. We took about 200 hundred pictures of chairs…each. I photographed this chair from a doorway that led into another room. At one point a woman was walking around outside below the window, and I said “there is a woman in the window” to myself, out loud. I didn’t realize there was a group of young children in the room behind me who had overheard what I said. They immediately rushed over wanting to the see the woman in the window. I didn’t understand at first, and then remembered we were in a ghost town and they wanted to see a ghost. They seemed very disappointed when I explained, but suitably distracted when I showed them how to take a picture of this chair for themselves.

I won’t bore you with all the details regarding this long, cold, painful morning in which Peter had me out on this viewing platform 2 hours before the big event was due to happen – a rainbow over Lower Yellowstone Falls. It seems, that after 21 years of marriage he has artfully learned to omit key details from his explanations about where we are going, when, and why. I will start with, I was bored to death, and freezing my keister off when I made this image. We were standing on that platform for over an hour, and when people arrived, I walked to the other side so they could view the falls. From the other side of the platform the canyon floor and river are blocked by rocks and trees. There isn’t a compelling subject to photograph. But I was just bored enough, just cold enough, and I had just started taking that online class, so I thought I would get some practice in. When I looked at the back of my camera, I started to get more and more excited. This really was a lemonade kind of moment for me. It turned out to be one of my favorite “all-time” images.

I made this image after my second day of class. When I look at it, it reminds me of the excitement I feel at the beginning of a new journey. This image represents the possibility of where I feel like I can create something new and different from a scene that has been photographed millions, maybe even bazillions of times before.

I watched people walk by this tiny pool of water every day for a week. It’s located in the Upper Geyser Basin amidst the big showy geysers. It was one of the few places where I could linger, without getting in the way of other visitors. Interestingly , as I stood there for over 20 minutes making this image, no one stood next to me to snap their own photo.

I followed up my initial class with another 2 hour lecture by a different instructor to learn how to process my images into something more abstract. It’s almost harder when the possibilities are limitless. I could spend hours, making layers, turning them at different angles on top of one another, changing blend modes, manipulating individual colors, etc. It’s a good exercise in trying to figure out when to stop. There was one decision I didn’t question while creating this final image – replacing the fluorescent green with a burnt yellow-orange color.

Yes, there is more to photograph at Peggy’s Cove than a lighthouse. The lighthouse is pretty special, but after photographing it for 36 hours straight, I needed a little change. I loved the small cove we walked by on our way to and from the lighthouse. I could have spent a week there watching the light change on the water, color the buildings, illuminate the sky. This image was particularly challenging for me to capture. I had a long exposure because of the lack of light, but the longer the exposure, the more the ships would blur because they were moving on the water. It was a game of trying to balance the variables.

This image was easier to make than the previous one. I’m not quite sure why I was so enamored with these two sheds, but I couldn’t stop making photos of them. I’ll stop with this thought, maybe creating a good photo isn’t as much a cerebral exercise, but an unexplainable emotional one.

To see more of our photos from our trips this year, and to buy our photographs, please go to www.pamphotography.com and check out more of our photos on FLICKR.