12, 2025

Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop
–– Ansel Adams

18 photographs; 1700 words; 9-minute read

Taking the word of the master to heart, I have assembled what, to me, are my twelve most significant photographs for 2025. I wrote about this last year and encouraged readers to work through this exercise.

Have you begun narrowing down your 12 for this year? I find it to be an excellent exercise in seeing: seeing what is working for you and what techniques you might consider refining or getting more practice with. Are you seeing a lot of repetition of technique or vision or are you working beyond what you have traditionally photographed?

The process

Narrowing down any body of work is a process, one I began a month ago by filtering all my 4- and 5-star rated photographs. But which ones are ‘significant’?

I define significant in a few ways. First of all, I want photographs that reflect a variety of locations and experiences I’ve had over the year. Each photograph must also have ‘nailed it’ in that they must work technically, aesthetically, and emotionally.

Significance

Technical significance means I have used the tools of photography to their best advantage in capturing the moment. To be aesthetically significant, a photograph must have that perfect blend of composition and movement to draw the viewer in, to have them ‘look again’, to tell a story, or evoke questions.

The most difficult aspect of photography is emotion. When I write of emotion, I don’t mean cutesy set-ups of babies or pets or couples walking on a beach at sunset. With nature and wildlife, this will often mean cute young fox kits or lambs gambolling or tender mother-young interactions. That is not what I want when I choose emotionally significant photographs. I want the photograph itself to be emotive, not the subject.

To me, emotive photographs cause the viewer to wonder and feel something beyond, “Oh, that’s cool.” They are drawn into the photograph on a level beyond the simple visual connection. Very few of my photographs ever achieve this level of engagement and certainly not all of my ‘12’ for this year have achieved it.

42 to 25

So, from all those 4- and 5-star photos, I selected 42 to begin my whittling down to 12. I looked for photographs that were successfully made using techniques new to me. Others speak to my dual desire of capturing ‘the essence of place’ and ‘the art inherent in nature’. Some are colour, others are black-and-white. Some portray movement and others are composite photographs—a technique I enjoyed exploring in 2025.

By carefully considering which duplicates and similar photographs to eliminate, I am managed to get that 42 down to 25; which is where the real work began. The process was simplified in Lightroom by creating albums: 2025-Best → 2025-25 → 2025-12.

The Final 12

In the final 12, I tried to preserve not just different photographic techniques, but also different perspectives, different ways of seeing and different experiences. You see, these are not my 12 ‘best’, but rather my 12 most significant. I could have chosen a dozen landscape scenes, or brilliantly coloured birds. The landscapes would simply be repetitions of landscapes; and for the bird photos, well, in many cases, it’s the bird that makes the photograph, not me, the photographer.

This happens a lot, as I alluded to above in the discussion about emotion. Over the course of each year, I see thousands of photographs across a variety of media, and I’m always conscious about whether it is the photograph that is significant or the subject.

Is it the photograph or the subject?

Photographers are very proud of their work, and rightly so, but many of the photos we see are great because of what was captured, as opposed to what the photographer did to make the photograph. I respect that there is certainly a lot of grey area between what any two people may think regarding where a photograph is on that spectrum, but to me it’s an important consideration.

Every photograph must have a subject of some kind. When considering photographs, the question I try answering is this:

Is it the subject that is drawing me in to the photograph, or is it the photograph itself—that combination of technique and aesthetic that creates an emotive response?

It’s the reason why I’ve left out many of the bird photographs I made. They sharp and colourful, but that just makes them glorified textbook images. As a result, I have preciously few photographs that rise to beyond this. My problem is, I am not one to see the abstract or the concept in subjects or scenes. By nature, I am a realist devoted to #RealWorldPhotography—the pursuit of photography to accurately reflect the reality of the scene or subject in front of me.

In other words, I tend to shoot the obvious. I work hard at going beyond the obvious, but still have a ways to go.

Conceptual Photography

There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept. — Ansel Adams

As I review my photographs each year, I tell myself this, over and over again—look beyond the obvious to the conceptual, the abstract—and re-commit myself to that goal. Over the years, I’ve made some progress, but am still blinded by all the beautiful, exotic, and colourful patterns and designs, tones and hues of the world around me.

Okay, enough introspection . . . Now for the photographs. They are presented in a Gallery format, sorted by capture date. Click on any photo to start and it will open in full-screen view with arrows to take you back and forth through the twelve. There is also a small ‘ i ’ button for more information.

So what do you think? Please continue the discussion by adding your COMMENTS, questions or experiences. And take a moment to SHARE this post with other photographers.