Favorite Images of 2015
For the last couple of years, I've made it a tradition to choose my favorite images for the year. In 2013, it was my 13 favorites. In 2014, my 14 favorites. And for 2015, you guessed it...my 15 favorite images for the year. Yeah, I know, really original. After giving it some thought, though, I've decided that 15 will be the max for each coming year, rather than continuing the upward progression. Who knows, some years may have less than 15 images, but I won't go over that number.
I tallied up the total number of images taken for 2015, and have to admit that even I'm a little surprised at the total. There are 31,539 images in my Lightroom catalog for the year. Not unexpectedly, the number of images taken has increased each of the last four years that I've been shooting. What was surprising is that the 2015 total is nearly double the number for 2014. Breaking it down further really shows where the bulk of my shooting was for last year.
Last May, I attended a photography workshop on the Oregon coast, then extended the trip to the Palouse region of Washington State. That trip alone yielded nearly 7,000 photos. A lot of the images on this list were taken on that trip. It was an amazing trip with some really incredible scenery.
Another 5,000+ images were made throughout the year of sunsets. That's a lot of sunset images! Some of you may have seen what seemed like a never-ending stream of these photos on the social networks. It was kind of a project that I took on early in the year and just kept it going...primarily to get myself out shooting more often. Maybe I will do some more this year...;-)
Night photography, primarily star trails, was another thing that used up a lot of pixels for 2015. I definitely plan to do more for 2016 and try some new techniques. Star trails take a lot of images to create since there are generally a long series of images taken in succession, which are stacked together to create the trails. A total of almost 4,000 images were dedicated to photographing the night in 2015.
Finally, I had the pleasure of taking portraits of several graduating seniors in the Spring and Fall seasons. It was lots of fun getting to know these young men and women better as we created some images that they will hopefully cherish for a long time. These constituted close to 2,500 images in the catalog.
Sorting through all of these images and narrowing them down to a total of 15 of my favorites for the year was no easy task. There are many more that I would have liked to include, but didn't want to 'water down' the list too much. These are my favorites. Maybe not necessarily the very best images, but many that I feel are pretty good. I hope you will enjoy them, too. Please leave a comment and let me know which is your favorite. It would be interesting to know. Now, let's get to the photos!