My Favorite Photos of 2024

With 2024 breathing its last, I decided to rewind time and relive my year as a photographer. Going through the photos I took over the past year made me realize that this was a year of “staying in place” more than big leaps in my development. There were no new tricks I learned. There wasn’t a new technique that made its way into my arsenal. Instead, I learned to get better at what I really liked.

Modern society has conditioned us to believe that we must constantly be going somewhere, doing something new, and indulging in the novel. If we’re not, we somehow feel we’re failing and perhaps not living up to our potential.

I, too, fell prey to that line of thinking and started to experiment with multiple cameras and different lenses. I tried four new cameras this year — the Leica SL3, Hasselblad X2D 100, Nikon Zf, and Leica Q3 43 — and multiple focal lengths. In my defense, though, the cameras I tried were for my desire to do “long-term” reviews on these devices.

When I reviewed my images from these various cameras, I realized I had found a vocabulary, and the camera itself was becoming fungible. What I look for in a digital camera is its ability to protect the highlights. The camera and post-processing are mere vehicles to help a photographer speak visually and clearly.

My desire these days is to expose as far to the right as I can without blowing out the image — and that is what I want from my camera. This allows me to get the airy and somewhat light feeling in my images. It also allows me to create images that aptly reflect solemnity, solitude, and silence. My photographic quest is to evolve slowly, finding that fine line between abstraction and reality. My images must exist at the edge of color and monochromatic, though not many from 2024 came close to this ideal.

The quest for this idea of photos that speak my language dominated my 2024. While only a handful of my images come close to this ideal, there were enough from the year that bring a smile of satisfaction. I’m sharing some of these images below. Some are from the Palouse, Yellowstone, and Vietnam — three very short photo trips I managed to sneak into this otherwise busy work year. But a majority are from San Francisco, a challenge in itself because the city is so familiar that it has lost its allure. Or has it? You decide, and let me know in the comments.

Happy New Year!

December 31, 2024. San Francisco

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