Something I haven’t ever really done is go through my archives in a systemic way and really take in what I’ve shot. With this being the end of the year, I was considering going back and looking for my top shots of the year but since it’s also the end of the decade, I thought it might be worthwhile to go back and look at my top shots from the last ten years. But rather than just look at the top ten overall—which would skew heavily to the last two years or so—I’m going with the top photo from each year.
Picking the best one from each year is obviously hard, especially given that I had a couple of pretty lean years in this span. Also, I had to resist the temptation to pick an “important” (but merely “very good”) photo over what was my best frame of that year. And so, with that, let’s begin.
2010 was virtually the stone age when it comes to me and photography. I’d long since been to Iraq and I’d been shooting regularly for about three years at this point but I still wasn’t really practicing photography intentionally. Largely my photography at this point was urban landscape focused (though at least my Chicago stuff was somewhat focused on endangered buildings and areas) and I was still developing a style and really learning how to see. I was also still heavily into HDR and the less said about that the better.
With all of the above, my best frame of the year was something of a lucky shot. But it does show use of negative space and rigid composition that I think my later stuff would demonstrate. And if nothing else, at least it’s not HDR.
Dupont Circle, Washington D.C. Aug. 2, 2010.
