This past year saw a continuation of a trend that has persisted since the Covid shutdowns – staying very close to home, if not in my backyard for most of my photography. To title this year’s Yearly Favorites a series of “Visions of a Hermit” would not be too far off. 😉 However, despite that self-imposed limitation, I always see something a little new, a bit differently – at least enough to keep me picking up the camera which often faces some headwinds. While travel does help greatly with inspiring new works, digging deeper into the familiar has its rewards.

As with my approach to previous yearly picks, I don’t view exposure as completion, which allows me some leeway in these selections. It also saves me the embarrassment of the very real and distinct possibility of not exposing anything worth a damn over the past year. Quite often, while dumpster diving through my archives through the year, I will develop and complete an image that may have been collecting digital dust for some time. In general, I have a lot more undeveloped exposures than I have time, insight, mood, attitude, persistence, or skills to bring to any form of, to borrow a music production term, mastering.

Technostress in the sky

New tools also bring forward new possibilities, which I utilized to some extent with a new drone, a Mavic 3 Pro. While I largely felt “forced” into making a new drone purchase even though I didn’t necessarily need one with the new Remote ID regulations, I can’t deny that having lens options in the sky offers more creative options to the standard “drone view.” One of these became a favorite from the year, with many second close calls.

However, the future of the new drone being compatible with my mapping applications is in question. This is a detail I couldn’t predict at the time of purchase as I expected DJI to ultimately release their SDK as they’ve done in the past. Wrong. My older drone, widely used for mapping, finally got a firmware update just a few weeks ago to make it Remote ID compatible. This happened just as DJI announced it wouldn’t support Apple devices anymore, throwing another rotten meatball in this spaghetti of future aerial work. Their suggestion – “use an Android phone.” (bwa-hahaha) Oh, if that isn’t enough – certain entities are banning the use of DJI drones, the leading global provider, out of fear they are the new Chinese spy balloons.¹

Conservation / Citizen Science

For my conservation/citizen science, slightly less hermitic activities, I confirmed indicator species and added another vernal pool for my county on the map, bringing the total to three. My wife and I obtained Michigan Master Naturalist certifications which took us exploring many different habitats around Southeast Michigan. We planted two red oak tree saplings in recognition of the high biodiversity species support they ultimately offer. I also renewed my term to 2026 on our city’s sustainability commission.

I also occasionally documented a variety of local wildlife on a trail cam and bird feeder cam. All of these seem hard to sum up, so maybe I should do more individual posts on these types of things in 2024.

Yearly favorites from 2023

So, after some deliberation and changing my mind a few times, the following images bubbled up as my picks for 2023. Again, these are photographs that were developed/mastered in 2023, seven out of 10 with exposures and development in 2023. These end-of-year posts can be a bit longer, but I hope you will find them worthwhile.

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Winter Ice on Lake Huron WI10731

I did a blog post in early 2023 on the lack of Great Lakes Ice cover at the time as it had been a bit since I photographed ice on the lakes. Thinking about that is the kind of trigger that usually sends me into my archives looking for unfinished work. While it is natural to think about climate change when it comes to ice cover, one also needs to consider there is a great deal of variation and other influences when it comes to ice cover.² And the expected El Niño adds an amplifier on top of all those other influences. I really liked the pastel calming tones of twilight in this photograph and the typical shoreline fracturing of ice sheets. It symbolized the long sleep of winter to me, although simultaneously a dynamic one. It was initially exposed in 2021, but “mastered” in 2023.

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River Birch Winter Wonderland WI10736

“Sticky” snowstorms are always a treat, making them hard to resist even for the most stubborn hermit. But it is winter beauty overload. You can go for a walk in the woods, and it is difficult to know where to point your camera because no photograph captures what it is like to be wholly immersed in a woodland of sticky snow. Every image disappoints to various degrees. So, what does a hermit do? He walks out to the back deck with a zoom lens, photographs trees in his yard, and returns for some warm coffee. It wasn’t until a bit later on, in the review of those images, that I found a few I liked for the simplicity of this massive sensory-overloaded environment.

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Seeking Light No. 1 TR10741

Some of my ideas come from being out in our yard playing with our dogs. They then get annoyed with me when I stop playing to go in and grab a camera. At first, I just liked the light on the bare branches of these large eastern cottonwood trees (Populus deltoides) that are behind our property against the clear sky. But on review later on, that “like” turned into a “meh” as a photograph. As I thought about the features that initially inspired me, all these little “fingers” of the tree appeared to be reaching out to the light in the sky, like a mesh of wires much like tendrils of mycelial pathways, aka. “nature’s internet.” After some play with some ideas, I devised a series of photographs based on this concept.

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Tangled LE10820

This photo is an older exposure, made with my D700 way back in 2011. I made it during an early spring walk in the woods behind our house, where I encountered a lot of deer from the other exposures on the same date in my archives. It seems not much worked with the deer, largely behind tangled thickets and brambles. For whatever reason, it sat in that folder until this year. I don’t remember how exactly I stumbled upon it, but something made me want to finish the image. The thick tangled vines with the American Sycamore leaf (Platanus occidentalis) had a lot of visual character – it boggles me why I didn’t develop this sooner. But I do not do well with distractions, easily losing my train of thought, which is hard to return to. That could be one explanation. I haven’t printed this image yet, but its provenance data would look something like Exposure 23 April 2011 // Developed 28 Nov 2023 // Print date TBD.

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American Lotus (Nelumbo lutea) FL10793

This past summer, I read an article on the significance of the lotus flower in Buddhism, which states that rising out of the muck and opening towards the sun are pathways to enlightenment. I knew I had some undeveloped lotus photographs in my archives from a visit to Lake Erie in 2019, so the article inspired me to take a look through them again. I suppose you could say this photograph rose out of the muck, but I wouldn’t go as far as to call it enlightened. Still, I liked the calming feel of the finished image and the feelings of peace it offers – which seem like very Buddhist-type messages to me. However, with all the conflicts going on in the world, one wonders if we will ever rise out of the muck to become that flower.

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Morning Sunshine and Trillium FL10788

Ahhh Spring! This woodland path is about a 5-minute drive from our house, a common place I visit for trillium and other spring wildflowers. I sometimes struggle to think of something new or exciting to photograph here as I have been here so often. I remember getting a late start that day when the sunlight in the forest was already quite harsh. Harsh light in a forest makes for visual stress because of all the points of contrast that draw your eye every which way. But the light did backlight a lot of the trillium nicely, I just had to find the right composition to portray that aspect.

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Fusion Series Redbud Blooms TR10761

This image resulted from some experimentation with concepts of connectivity in nature and in-camera double exposures. It takes two characteristics of the same subject or their environment, fusing them with a double exposure. It is something I am interested in experimenting with a bit further, but I didn’t get much else to work the rest of the year.

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Autumn Sycamore FC10812

I spotted this ghostly sycamore tree while doing some spy balloon <ahem> aerial photography over the nearby Clinton River. This is where the lens options of the new drone came in useful. Using the compression aspects of the medium telephoto lens (70mm f/2.8), I was able to isolate this autumn woodland scene that would have been more difficult to just fly closer to. In development, I just liked the deeper, late autumn earth tones that were prominent in contrast to the characteristic bark of this sycamore. Having 48 MP to work with didn’t hurt either for all the little details.

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Frosty Metasequoia Bald Cypress Needles LE10827

EDIT 2024Apr23: A bit of a mea culpa! For many years, I considered this one tree in our backyard as a “dawn redwood” because it was gifted to us as such. It looked similar enough to our others to not question it. However, only recently did I take a closer look, given the very different budding behavior between it and our other trees. As I have also read about a very similar tree, the Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichum), that is often confused with a Dawn Redwood, I investigated further into the telltale differences. The alternating needle pattern, as well as the bud pattern on the branches, seem to indicate it is actually a Bald Cypress! (vs. the Dawn Redwood’s being directly opposite each other) OOPS. Sincerely, The Botany Flunkee.

This photo resulted from going out exploring little leaf details in my yard with my Nikkor 200mm micro lens. It is a bit rare to see this type of color gradient on fallen needles from our metasequoia (Dawn Redwood) trees. (Edit: the reason it is rare is revealed, because this isn’t from one of our dawn redwoods! 🙂 ) This find instantly became a favorite. The simple background of other leaves I found it on added nice supporting graphical and color elements. I used this image for some winter solstice cards I sent out, but I did run into gamut limitations of the Moab Entrada matte photo card stock I used, no matter how much soft proof tweaking I seemed to do. I ended up scrapping a lot of photo cards just trying to get it as close as possible. I still liked it enough, though, to use the more muted printed version. It communicated a lot of what the solstice time was like this year.

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Backlit Metasequoia Bald Cypress TR10815

This photograph results from another “out playing with the dogs” spotting of a subject and was another reminder of ways to use harsh light. It is a rather young tree, only about 6″ DBH (15 cm), but has a good assortment of the characteristic branches of this species. While it turns a nice burnt amber color in fall, I didn’t pay much attention seeing it front-lit. Again, harsh light, not so flattering. But once I saw it from behind, looking up with the canopy glowing, I knew I had to try to make an image from it. On a technical note, this photograph is Glazed. That means if it is ingested by an AI training bot, it will not represent a backlit metasequoia tree.³

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That’s it for Twenty Twenty-Three. I hope you enjoyed some additional insight into these photographs and why I picked them. No doubt 2024 will probably have more dumpster dives, experiments, and exploration—even if just close to home or from a Chinese spy balloon. The dogs will be annoyed with playtime interruptions, the coyotes will howl, and maybe, just maybe, an AI bot will visit this site and only see pictures of cats.

Best wishes and health to you in 2024!

Mark

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1. Just writing this paragraph gives me a headache, and probably you too – do not ask me what is going on. I don’t have a friggin’ clue. ↩︎
2. Great Lakes ice cover bounces all over the place — NOAA GLER Historical Data ↩︎
3. I am still evaluating this tech, finding it messes up my Lightroom keywords a bit. It represents another step in my workflow but is intriguing. It sucks we have to consider such things now with the rapid growth of generative AI. It offers at least some type of counteroffensive against this threat to creators, including the potential poisoning of AI models when the Nightshade option is released—another post to come in 2024. ↩︎