Fantastic shots - very impressive work and consistency! These are my favorites. Really wonderful photography and a great inspiration for trying architectural photography myself sometimes in the future!
Always nice to look back, at other peoples pictures as well as my own. Most of these have been posted previously on the weekly 'Through your Eyes' thread.
The first four are all very close to home, on my daily walks.
Wow, what a tough job it was narrowing down to just twelve. My initial pass through this years images initially got me down to 375 that I liked enough to stick in my Best Of_2023 collection. I managed to refine that down to 81 images and then spent ages trying to get just 12 from that set. After some deliberation I ended up with about 20 images that were my favourites from those. So the eight that got thrown back into the lower tier were eliminated purely to reduce the numbers, they could just as easily be swapped in with what I've included here.
These were taken with a number of cameras, the Nikon Z7 (1,2,3,5,11,12), the Fujifilm X-H2 (4) and the Fujifilm GFX100S (6,7,8,9,10) which I purchased second hand in September and have barely stopped using since, although it's a bit too big and heavy for me to drag up even a small mountain, so the Nikon definitely still has its place in my camera collection.
All images were processed from individual raw files in Capture One Pro 23. The Nikon and X-H2 were shot handheld, while all of the GFX pics were taken on a tripod. While it's perfectly fine to shoot the GFX handheld, I'm finding that to get any resolution benefit from the larger pixel count I really need to use a tripod, which is another reason it's not going up mountains any time soon with me.
So, in chronological order, here are my 12 favourite(ish) images of 2023.
1. Sunset at Great Hill Farm
I really like this viewpoint and have shot it in various conditions since discovering it late in 2022 (a print of the shot I took on that day is on my living room wall). This version was taken the day after new years day when I was lucky enough to witness such a beautiful sunset.
2. Lone Tree Over Tilberthwaite
Taken on a trip to the Coniston Moor in February. I spotted this tree early in the walk and it ended up being my favourite shot from the trip.
3. Lone Tree at Runestone Quarry
This was taken in March after returning to Tilberthwaite to visit Runestone Quarry. This is a spectacular long trench cut into the lower flanks of Wetherlam. The weather conditions were pretty wretched and drizzly on that day, but it suited the mood of the quarry perfectly.
4. Lone Tree at Botany Bay Farm
A bit of a pattern emerging here with the lone trees, but I promise this is the last (all subsequent trees have very active social circles). This is a tree that stands alone on Withnell Moor and marks the spot where Botany Bay farm once stood before the land was purchased for water capture and the moorland farms were one by one demolished as they became vacant. It is said to be more than 100 years old and spends a large part of the year looking dead as a doorpost, but here in this sunset shot I've caught it as it was beginning to bloom towards the end of May.
5. One Evening At The Goit
Taken around teatime one pleasant evening in June. The Goit is a man made canal that carries water collected from the local moors and the Roddlesworth reservoir chain around the lower flanks of Anglezarke moor to deliver it into the larger Rivington reservoir chain. I typically cross it on foot when I head up to the moors for an evening.
6. Sunset in Great Langdale
This was taken in September on one of my first outings with the GFX100S on an impromptu visit to Great Langdale, specifically the hills North of Elterwater.
7. Sunset over Heapey Moor
This was taken in late September at the end of a pleasant photo shoot in Brinscall Woods. I'd spent most of the evening at the opposite end of the woods and noticed the light was beginning to get quite nice, so I raced along The Goit as fast as I could drag my camera and tripod to a little spot I know on the Southern edge of the woods that provides this nice view looking across Heapey Moor towards Healey Nab and in the distance Harrock Hill. With my heart racing I managed to arrive just in time to get set up and grab several shots of this lovely late summer light.
8. Edge of Autumn
Taken in the early part of October in the woods below King's How in Borrowdale. I'd spent the afternoon exploring and photographing Cummacatta Wood and eventually reached this location towards the end of the day. The autumn colours were only just beginning to kick in at this point and this spot in the shadow of Greatend Crag was receiving no direct sunlight, giving everything a painterly look. I think this was also my first time out with the 32-64 and I was amazed at the fine detail when I got these shots back home.
9. Remember To Look Up
This was taken in November and I'm back in my local area at Brinscall Woods hunting for autumn colours. By this point things had really started kicking off and I almost missed this scene entirely as I was on my way to a specific location at the time. These trees stand at the top of a steep slope and I just happened to glance up and see the riot of colour above me. In the days that followed we were hit with gales and when I returned a week later there wasn't a single leaf left on any of these trees.
10. Après Autumn
This was taken a week after the previous photograph at the location I'd been heading to when I took that. When I photographed this scene a week earlier it too was a riot of colour, but here there are just handfuls of leaves clinging on.
11. Fine Weather
At the beginning of December I took another trip to The Lake District, this time heading up to the Dunnerdale fells. The forecast was for a bright, chilly day and we set out fully prepared for this. Roughly halfway there the weather went completely off script and it started snowing. Heavily. After just five minutes cars were fishtailing and sliding around, so I decided the rather remote Dunnerdale may not be the best destination and instead rerouted to Ings and a parking location beside a major road, figuring if more snow came down I'd still be able to get back home. With this in mind we set out on foot towards Sour Howes and Sallows, a pair of mid level Wainwrights a few miles away. This was taken on the outgoing leg of the walk as the snow continued to come down very heavily.
12. Sheep and A Tree
Taken towards the end of the same walk as the previous picture. By the time we'd reached the foot of Sallows we were showing early signs of weariness from trudging through the snow, so rather than tackling the hill we looped back around the lower flanks of Hugill Fell. By the time we returned to the car the best part of a foot of snow had fallen and the main road we were parked beside was in chaos with a huge static queue of vehicles as far as the eye could see, but only in the direction leading deeper into The Lake District, in the direction we needed to go it was pretty much clear, so we got back home with no incident unlike many of those in that queue who ended up abandoning their cars.
Bonus Pic
It was a toss up which snow pictures to remove from the set and I ended up taking this one out, but it could just as easily have been one of the others. Anyway, I've used this one for Christmas cards this year, so I could hardly take it out entirely could I? Merry Christmas all. Hopefully I'll see you on the other side.
Just WOW! I feel like most people (including me) would be happy to have a single shot like those to show at the end of the year... Really exceptional photography!
Well it has been an interesting journey after buying my first digital camera back in February, ostensibly to shoot dogs at a breeder's because my phone just didn't cut it. Wanting to fly before I could walk. Realising how much I like nature but having never really immersed myself in it until now. It has been a rewarding experience, helped along by the good folk in the Wednesday C&C, other Image discussions here at DPrevived and the Panasonic Compact Camera Talk forum at DPR.
Very, very difficult to cull my favourites down to 12 - it has at least forced me to go back and properly categorise my low percentage of ok ones from what is now a big 10,000 pile of very average stuff...
My favourite bird snaps: Blue and Yellow Faced Honeyeaters, Rainbow Lorikeet, Brown Falcon and Kookaburra
Insects:
The only flower from quite a few, just because it is delicate
Because there had to be at least one of my faithful K9 Ravi...
Thanks sj, yes it was my favourite too, hence top of the list. There is a story to tell. I stopped to snap an old church that is now in private hands. The tree was in the grounds and I could hear the birds. Those birds will let you get up to about 10 mtrs, so I was lucky that everything aligned. No special planning on my part...