My Favorite Photos of 2022

I take a lot of photographs. This wasn’t always the case; in the days before cell phones, I rarely carried a camera with me, and therefore rarely captured many moments. But the iPhone era has been good to me. I make it a point to figure out the best models for taking pictures and learn all the tricks for getting the most out of the cameras. I have learned how to shoot in RAW format to unlock more editing potential, and I am constantly switching between my phone’s three lenses to find the best aspects and lighting.

In the past I have enjoyed putting my favorite photos from the previous year on Instagram and Facebook, but this year I thought it would be fun to say a few words about each of them here. In no particular order, these are my favorite photos of 2022.

This shot was taken from a footbridge in Collegeville, Minnesota in July, after 9:00 p.m. The light lingers for so long at that latitude, and I was out for a walk after a session of the writing workshop I was attending there at the Collegeville Institute—a workshop that helped launch, among other things, this Substack.

My wife’s favorite fountain sits in our front yard from roughly April through October, once the threats of hard freezes have passed. This photo was taken in late August, when the aspen leaves were just beginning to turn yellow and fall into the water.

I really love night photography because of the alchemy of it. This was taken in RAW format with the iPhone’s night mode, which allows me to control the shutter speed. This is a 30-second exposure, which was tough to pull off with (unwitting) human subjects. But these three paused for just long enough under the full moon, at about 11:00 p.m., to watch the waves.

I took this photo in Collegeville Minnesota during the same writing retreat, while on a long and meandering walk with a former colleague and dear friend. It’s a view across one of the several glacial lakes there, from a rickety single-track footbridge. In the distance is the Collegeville Institute, and to the right behind the trees is the campus of St. John’s University.

Red Rocks is the closest I usually get to an ecstatic experience, and I was fortunate enough to see three shows there this year—Brandi Carlile (with the Indigo Girls) in September, and two nights of Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit in May. This is a shot from one of the Jason Isbell shows. He’s my favorite artist, and it was a classic Colorado May night, with cold rain, a bit of snow, and lots of Red Rocks magic.

At that same Collegeville writing workshop, a group of colleagues and I hiked out alongside a lake to a chapel on the other side, and sat there and watched the sun set. This was taken after 9:00 p.m., just before we started the trek back to our rooms.

When we moved into our house in February 2020, and the first pandemic spring came along, a strange plant sprung up in the front yard. At first we thought it was something illicit, because of the distinctive shape of its leaves, but in time we figured out that it’s what many people call a Hardy Hibiscus, a species of rosemallow, and it comes back every year to produce these deep-red enormous blossoms. Each blossom lasts only one day, and when they are fully open they are about the size of my head.

I try to make a couple of trips through Guanella Pass each year, especially in fall when the aspens turn. This was taken on October 1st, and it was snowing hard at the highest points of the pass (about 12,500 feet) and misty at the lower elevations (about 9,000 feet).

I took this only a few days ago, at Emerald Isle, North Carolina. We decided to take a last-minute Christmas trip to the beach. The Bogue Inlet Pier is visible in the distance. If you are familiar with the work of David Sedaris and his references to his beach house, that house is about a third of the way down the beach toward the pier. I know where it is because I was renting the house next door, owned by Sedaris’ partner Hugh, when Hurricane Florence hit. Let’s just say my writing retreat was interrupted.

These are a few of the several dozen horses in the herd at Ring Lake Ranch near Dubois, Wyoming. This summer we made a third trip to the ranch, which our kids love a lot. The ranch is directed by a friend of ours, and while we aren’t really horse people, we do enjoy boating on the lake there and taking in the mountain air.

I took this photo on our first night at Ring Lake Ranch, sort of as a test shot, expecting to take more night shots later in the week. But smoke from a wildfire rolled in, and this turned out to be the best picture of the stars I got all week. You can see the Milky Way behind the trees.

When I posted this photo on Instagram and Facebook last week, several people asked what filter I was using. There’s no filter here; the sunsets really do look like this, nearly every night. If anything, this undersells it; it’s hard to capture the shimmers and and movements in a still image. These purples popped out for less than a minute, five or six minutes after sunset, and then subsided into oranges and yellows.

This is another photo from Guanella Pass, from a trail alongside a series of waterfalls that we always like to hike. There are so few proper forests in Colorado that I really love the time we spend up there.

A couple of years ago Jessa paid some guys to hang Christmas lights in the giant maple tree in our front yard, but pretty quickly most of them stopped working. We tried to take them down this past spring, but it turns out that the tree is too tall and the cords are too entangled with the branches. So we did the best we could, and discovered that extension cords work pretty well as rope swings (if you’re 15 years old).

Craggy Pinnacle is one of the standards stops on our itinerary any time we are in the Asheville area. We’ve been going there for as long as we’ve known each other, and it’s a short enough hike from the Blue Ridge Parkway that we can do it with no prep or equipment and the kids won’t grumble too much. This is the view toward the southeast, into the Swannanoa River Valley.

The aspen trees in our side yard are one of the best things about our house. In the fall they blanket the yard in silvery-black and yellow leaves, and in the summer they form a grove of shady calm. I especially like the light through them after a spring rain.