2025: The year in photography

It was a good year for photography. Wow, that was easy! Next post!

OK, I’ll go into it a little more. I don’t want to do a long boring thing here, but I noticed a number of things as the year progressed that I take to mean I did, in fact, get better at photography. I “leveled up”, as the kids say.

First, I started getting a lot more confident about just taking the picture. I used to hem and haw and wonder if it was the right shot or if I should or shouldn’t be taking that person’s picture or if I had my composition exactly right or if my settings were right because what if they weren’t and I took the right photo but with the wrong settings so it would end up looking bad and what if…you know the drill. I used to feel a lot of indecision when taking photos, and the result of this was, oddly, taking more photos than I needed, because I find that this lack of knowledge and confidence leads to what photographers call “spray and pray”. That’s when you take a ton of photos in hopes that a few of them might, if you’re lucky enough, turn out to actually be good. And hey, doing that usually gets you something usable. After all, as Ian Fleming wrote, “You cannot sow a million seeds without reaping one potato.” (From Russia, With Love.)

In 2025 I noticed that I was seeing the photo more before I snapped the shutter. Did I always get the photo? Well, no. But I saw it! And that’s definitely an improvement. And a lot of the time, I did get the photo. Yes, there were a bunch of times where I found myself saying to myself, “Ach, ye screwed up the settings and couldnae fix them ‘ere you snapped yon shutter!” (Yes, when scolding myself, it’s in a weird Doohan-esque Scottish brogue.) But I also found myself starting to understand my settings better and being able to adjust them more quickly. Again, that’s huge.

I also felt my eye developing. It’s one thing to be able to competently grab the photo, but it’s quite another to see the compelling composition unfolding before you, to note the leading lines that have presented themselves, and to quickly decide on where to place your subject or where to wait for them to be for the best photo. So, did photography become easier for me in 2025? I’m not sure I’d say that…but it became less of a challenge. Less of a mystery. And that makes me happy.

I also became more aware of what my preferred genres and styles of photography are: streetscapes, infrastructure, nature, floral, and festivals. This is by no means permanent, obviously; you never know how these things will develop, and who knows…when I upgrade my camera set-up to include changeable lenses with some wide-aperture options, maybe I’ll find myself gravitating to portraits.

The balance of this post is a selection of photos of mine from 2025 that I particularly like. As always, all of my best photo work can be found on my Flickr stream. I was going to group this series of posts by photo genre, but you know what? That feels a bit too much like work. So instead, we’ll just randomly hop through my photographic year over a series of posts. (By the way, I’m hoping to have my full 2025 Quiz post up on Saturday.)