My best photos of 2020 - Family and skiing

 

2020 is down to its last few days.  So it is time for my annual 'best photos of 2020' blog posts.  At the end of every year I go through all my photos and edit them down to just the best.  I have found it a very useful exercise - it both helps me understand what is working when I take photos (makes me a better photographer) and I also end up with a folder of the best photos.  An edited file of photos is so much more useful than a HUGE morass of photos. 

This year over the course of a few days I went through all the images I have stored in iPhoto.  My iPhoto images had already been culled of the worst photos.  As I went through them I threw any likely photo into a file on the desktop. I ended up with about 650 images.  It was easy to then cull this down to the best 420 images of 2020.  That's still way too many photos for a 'best of 2020' post!  And that's when the hard editing work began.  I did a lot of picking and choosing and got it down to 60 photos, and then when back and forth on those and picked out what I think are the absolute best pictures I took in 2020.  But that's just what I think today - all of the final 420 are pretty good.  I find that my choices change daily - it's sort of like picking out a favorite song and seems to change depending on my mood.

In any case, I've noticed that in 2020 I seem to have taken relatively few landscapes.  More and more of my 'best' photos have people in them.  I'm wondering if that's because I have already 'seen' most of the good views to be had near town.  There are a lot of great landscapes that I have captured with my camera too many times.  In this regard, Sharatin Mountain as seen from Pyramid Mountain comes to mind.  As does the snow-covered summit of Pyramid silhouetted against the blue sky.  I've taken those photos so many times. ... 

Funnily enough I also noticed that none of my close ups of flowers, plants or animals made the final 20.  I did take a lot of good bird and flower pictures but they all just seem a little cliche to make the final 'best' of the best.  I actually think taking a good bird or plant up close photo is all about technique - find a bear, flower or bird and use your telephoto or macro lens.  Done! and you got an exciting photo.  But it is not, by any means, a unique photo either.

This year I divided the final 20 photos into 2 general themes for the end of year 'best of' blogposts.  This post contains the photos of family and friends and skiing photos while the next post has all the landscape and 'non' family people pictures.  I did do some photography for the Alutiiq Museum's BIA funded photo documentation project and I notice that quite a few of the 'non' family photos were taken as a part of that project.  Patrick