I’ve never done a best-of or favorites-of-the-year blog post before, but then 2020 was not your average year. Several years back, I did a few worst-of-the-year blog posts, not just to be a contrarian, but also because I’m a firm believer that one of the best ways to improve your photographer is to critically examine your mistakes. But I stopped doing these worst-of-the-year posts because I improved my editing speed (from years to months) such that I was throwing out the bad ones before the end of the year came.
So why now a favorites-of-the-year? I’m not sure; perhaps it was because it was such a bad year otherwise with the pandemic that I wanted to convince myself I did some good work. I purposely made this my favorites rather than my best, though there is some overlap perhaps, because my favorites shots have better stories than my best shots. Besides it is hard enough picking favorites let alone best. So, here are 12 of my favorite images taken in 2020 presented in no particular order.
Tanya gave me a drone for Christmas in 2019, and one of my first true opportunities to use it came in March when Tanya and I took a day trip to the Olympic Peninsula. After a short hike, I flew the drone over the Duckabush and Dosewallips River deltas on Hood Canal. This shot from the Duckabush is my favorite of that day (you can see more in this post) and indeed my favorite drone shot of all last year. Of course, I didn’t use it too many times before I lost it (see Little Redfish Lake below – luckily, Tanya gave me a drone for Christmas 2020, and hopefully she will not be getting me another in 2021). In the above shot, I really like the interplay of the colors in the water, the shape of the islands, and all the seals sunbathing upon them (those little blobs on the southern end of the islands are seals). It has the hallmarks of a good drone shot (in my opinion) – patterns and textures not normally seen from the ground.
While Tanya and I spent most of 2020 home because of the pandemic, by September we decided we we’d risk going out on a camping trip to Idaho and Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. For most of the trip, we felt good about braving the pandemic by largely maintaining social distance from other campers and tourists, though at times, especially in Yellowstone, that was difficult (see Satisfied Grizzly below). We spend three nights camping at Little Redfish Lake at the base of the Sawtooth Mountains near Stanley, Idaho. Though most the campgrounds in the area were full, it was easy to keep to ourselves.
I took a lot of good images in the Stanley area, and though I probably took better sunrise shots from Redfish Lake, this stitched panoramic image of Little Redfish Lake is one of my favorites from trip to the Sawtooths. I shot it on our first morning there, just steps from our campsite. Seeing that first sunrise on the Sawtooths was magical.
Besides the beautiful light of that first morning, this image is a favorite because of the bittersweet memory of my last drone flight. On our final day in the Stanley area, I was flying my drone over Little Redfish Lake and had taken some good images, or at least I thought had. But I was never ever to confirm that, because when I was flying the drone back to our campsite, the drone lost contact with the remote control and decided to land in the middle of the lake. I will always remember Little Redfish Lake, both for its beautiful light and for one drowned drone.
Satisfied Grizzly
This is one of the last shots I took in Yellowstone National Park on that trip back in September. Frankly, it is not that great of a shot – shooting long distance through fog does not make for technically good images. But capturing a shot of a grizzly resting upon its kill was a highlight of the trip. I posted this shot previous and tell there the back story of how this grizzly killed and partially buried his prize bull elk. As this bear is near a road and had been on his kill several days prior to me taking this shot, you might imagine the spot was popular with photographers and wildlife enthusiasts. And you would be right. In order to capture this shot, I had to drive about a 1/2 mile down the road to find a parking spot, and then brave being shoulder to shoulder with many other photographers, few of which were masking up. But since I didn’t get sick, I think the result was worth the risk.
Like the grizzly shot, I’ve posted this image (and the Bellowing Bison below as well) before, but not with the backstory. As mentioned, on our trip we also went to Grand Teton National Park. The weather was good the five days we were in the park except for thick smoke from wildfires. That really put a damper on my landscape shooting. But luckily, Grand Teton is an excellent wildlife park as well. While you still need to be lucky to see (let alone photograph) some animals there, such as moose and bears, pronghorns are relatively easy to find. Though easy to find, they are often far from the road and spend most of their time standing around grazing, which doesn’t make for the most interesting shots. Our last morning in the park, we decided to leave the campground and drive the around the aptly named Antelope Flats Road rather than straight out to the highway. We were rewarded by seeing a herd of pronghorns. It was still early, and apparently many were still laying in the grass instead of up and grazing for the day. Or maybe it was just the young ones (teenagers?) not wanting to get out of bed for the day. Regardless, I love the look of these young ones peeking up through the grass.
Bellowing Bison
Here is another of my favorites for Grand Teton National Park. There is a large herd of bison that generally roams the Antelope Flats area. They are easy to spot, just look for large dark beasts off in the distance. With luck they will be near a road and you can get some good shots. On this particular day, I was out doing photography while Tanya was back at the our camp. I was on my way back, taking Mormon Row (a fairly rough dirt road) as a short cut back to our campground. About a 1/2 mile down the road, I found the herd grazing near in the near distance and slowly wandering toward the road. I stopped and photographed for a half hour or so. Thinking that Tanya would like to see the herd up close, I called her and said I’d be there in about 15 minutes to pick her up. I slowly drove through the herd, which was starting to cross the road, and went to get Tanya. When we got back, the herd had not moved much. We pulled to a stop and slowly the herd surrounded our car. For large animals, they don’t make much noise. But then on young male, not 10 meters from our car started bellowing for some reason. I was able to capture him in mid-bellow giving me a look.
Tetons in Black and White
As I mentioned above, the wildfire smoke was thick most of the time we were in the Tetons. That made it tough for landscape photography. I dutifully rose for sunrise every morning, driving out to the must-shoot sites (Mormon Row barns, Oxbow Bend, etc.) only to have the mountains look like pale shadows of themselves due to the smoky haze. I photographed anyway, because how often will I be back?
Using the dehaze slider in Lightroom is one way to battle smoke, but if the smoke is too thick, it can only help so much. I’ve learned that converting to black and white, combined with a lot of processing, can save an image. I’ve converted several of my landscape shots from the Tetons to black and white for that reason. This one is a favorite largely because it is not one of the must-shoot locations, but rather just a stop along the road where I saw some isolated trees mimic the mountains. It was shot near mid-day, not a perfect time, but when battling wildfire smoke, it is often less hazy in the middle of the day (as the light travels through less smoke when coming vertically in rather than horizontally during the golden hours).
A Simple Field
This is a scene from Yellowstone, just down the road a couple miles from the grizzly. I took a lot of images in Yellowstone of steaming and smoldering thermal features (see Blue Hole below), but Yellowstone is so much more than that. It’s a huge wilderness, a mix of high elevation prairies and forests without spectacular mountain scenery like the Tetons (or indeed portions of the Cascade Mountains here in Washington). This image, I think, shows a part of Yellowstone that most people drive right by and perhaps don’t appreciate as much as they should. Here, I like the simplicity of the image – a wandering creek, a golden-red meadow, and a broad cloud-filled sky. Would have been nice to have a couple bison standing in the field, but you can’t have everything.
Blue Hole
In Yellowstone, I shot images of Old Faithful and several other geysers spouting water. However, my favorite image of any thermal features there is this shot of Cistern Spring in the Norris Geyser Basin. If you do a Google image search of Cistern Spring, you will see that most of the images show the water as green where deep and yellowish around the edges where shallow. Yet when I was there, it was the beautiful milky blue color that contrasted so well with beige and browns of the ground and the dark grey cloudy sky. Being a geologist, I speculated on why the color difference, and perhaps my fellow geologist/photographer friend Duncan Foley, who is an expert on the thermal features of Yellowstone, can comment on my speculation. I understand that Cistern Spring is connected underground to the nearby Steamboat Geyser (the largest geyser in the world). Steamboat Geyser doesn’t erupt very often, but when it does, Cistern Spring drains than slowly refills. As it turned out, Steamboat Geyser is in an active phase this year (erupting over 40 times), and it erupted for an hour and 17 minutes just three days before I took this photograph. That was a major eruption, since most of its eruptions are considerably less than an hour long. My speculation is that the eruption of Steamboat Geyser shook loose silt and clay particles in the underground water works, causing the milky blue color in Cistern Spring as it refilled. Regardless of whether this is true, the spring was beautiful that day.
Cliffs and Sky
Tanya and I made several other shorter trips during the year, though fewer than we would during a “normal” year. In May, we drove over the Cascades to do a hike at Sun Lakes State Park in central Washington. After our hike, we drove the rough dirt road to Dry Falls Lake. The weather was changing and brought with it these fantastic clouds. It was about a half hour before sunset, and warm light was painting the cliffs. Being spring, the vegetation in this desert area still had a fair amount of green. It all added up to one of my favorite shots of the year.
Repeating Ridges
In late August, I took a backpacking trip by myself to Mount Adams. In a non-pandemic year, I’d probably would have found someone to go with me, but solo seemed to be the thing to do this year. I spent one night at High Camp (see my last blog post) and a second night below High Camp at a spot several hundred meters off the Pacific Crest Trail. The image above was shot just a couple steps from my tent at that second spot. While on the trip, I took many images of Mount Adams, Mount Rainier, and Mount St. Helens, but my favorite shot of the entire trip is this one showing of a series of repeating mountain ridges shortly after sunset. If I count correctly, it there are eight sets of ridges in this photo. Their dark blues contrast wonderfully with the fiery reds and yellows of the post-sunset sky.
Rainier Moon
I’ve been seeking a shot like this one for for over a year as I explained in an earlier blog post this year. No wonder it one of my favorites of the year! The full moon rises over Rainier only a couple times a year as viewed from Tacoma, and I’ve made several attempts to capture it. On August 1st, the last occurrence of the event in 2020, I was finally able to get a combination of warn sunset light and a cloudless eastern sky. And I only had to travel about a mile from my house to photograph it. That was a bonus.
Eightmile Lake
I’m at the point in my day job as a groundwater geologist that I rarely get to leave to office, rather I’m tied to my desk directing young geologists in the field. However, this year my firm is on a team picked to do an environmental impact statement concerning a dam replacement at Eightmile Lake in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area. A dam in a wilderness area you say, how can that be? Well the dam was there first; the wilderness declaration came much later. However, the dam is now unsafe and needs to be replaced. As you might imagine, this is a bit contentious, and as a neutral party working on the EIS, I’m looking forward to many interesting meetings in the new year on this project. Because of the contentious nature of the project, I thought it best that I visit the dam site myself. Contracting on the project took awhile, creating a very short field season to actually visit the lake – basically two or three weeks in October prior to snow covering the trail (waiting until the spring thaw would be too late for the field work). So in mid-October, I hiked up to the lake with two of my co-workers. A wind storm had come through a couple days prior to our hike, tossing dead trees (from a fire several years earlier) down across the trail like matchsticks. We had word from other consultants on our team, that had tried to hike to the lake the day before, that they turned back because of the downed trees and, oh by the way, it was miserable weather with a mix of rain and snow. We almost called it off, but decided to try for the lake. And I’m so glad we did. We made it through the downed trees without too much effort and got to the lake near mid-day. The lake was a mirror, and fresh snow from the day before decorated the nearby mountains. This stitched panorama shot from that day became one of my favorites of the year.