OK, this is it! The last of my Photography favorites for 2025. As I’ve noted before, all of my photography ends up on Flickr, where I really try to organize things into albums for convenience. (I also use Flickr for image hosting on this site, so there’s a lot of stuff there scattered throughout that isn’t mine. These are always noted in the image descriptions.) In terms of photographic gear, all photos are currently taken either on my Lumix FZ1000ii (“Miranda”), or my phone, a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra (“Ophelia”). Now, the photos…and at the end, my six favorite self-portraits from 2025.
Yes, I like my own work! And I’m not gonna apologize for that. So there!
Moving on. These are in no particular order, but they do mostly come from the latter half of the year. There will be one more of these posts after this one.
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.)
A pretty significant winter storm rolled through the northeast the other day, and Buffalo doesn’t tend to get hit too hard by these when they roll through; we’re generally on the outer fringes of whatever dumps snow and ice (or rain) on the northeast corridor. But we did get some ice out of the deal. Here’s the resulting ice as it coated the berries that were left behind on one of the trees in our backyard.
Taken on Miranda (Lumix FZ1000ii) f/2.8, 1/640, 9mm, ISO400
Taken on Miranda (Lumix FZ1000ii) f/2.8, 1/640, 9mm, ISo400
LEO: (Leo is the stoner who owns the local Foto Hut) I saw a UFO once, man. It was awesome! It just hung in the air, then it sent me a message. In big, bright, yellow letters. Said I was going to have a good year.
STEVEN HYDE:Â (Steven is one of the main teenagers on the show) Did this, by any chance, happen at a football game?
LEO: Yeah, man! And the weird thing is, I was the only one freaking out about it, man! Wait a second… Good year? No, it was a terrible year, man! Stupid aliens.
Why do I bring this up? Because that same UFO was visible from outside my house as it hovered above Highmark Stadium during the Bills-Chiefs game. That’s a good idea, if you’re flying a UFO; you can study humans from right above the stadium where an NFL game is happening because nobody there is looking up at your alien craft. Except for the photographer-writer who lives one neighborhood away. I’m onto you, aliens!
Ohio Street rail yard, Buffalo, NY f[9.0, 1/160sec, ISO100
A few weeks ago I went down to the foot of Ohio Street in Buffalo, near its southern terminus at Fuhrmann Boulevard, near the Outer Harbor. My main purpose was to do some shooting of the amazing graffiti that adorns the Ohio Street overpass (I’ll feature that work in a future post, though I’ve already posted the images to Flickr), but as I was there some railroad activity. The overpass carries Ohio Street over the rail lines that service the cargo areas near the big grain silos downtown, a remnant of what once was in terms of freight transport in this region. They were moving lines of cars from one line to another, connecting and reconnecting the locomotive as needed. It was a fascinating process to watch, and in the photo above, that locomotive is actually pushing that line of cars down the track, not pulling them as it arrives.
Still, trains and locomotives are absolutely fantastic subjects, and if there’s one nearby and I have a photographic device on my person, IÂ will get a shot of it!
(And the title of this post comes from here, which is the single greatest cover of an already great song in the history of popular music, a position against which I will listen to no argument.)
