Here is a collection of some of my favorite photographs from 2025. Assembling annual collections gives me a opportunity to get a better overview of my work over the longer term. The project also jogs my memory and gives me a chance to relive memorable experiences from the past year.

Here is a set of thumbnails of the selected photographs. You can pick the image for a better view of the set, but continue reading to see larger versions of the photographs read more about each image.

I prefer the term “favorites” over “best” since I’m not really able to know which are best — that’s a subjective thing, its not entirely my decision, and it changes over time. But right now, I can say for sure that these are among my favorites.

Choosing the set is challenging! Near the end of the process I must eliminate photographs that are also favorites in order to keep the collection to a reasonable size. (Perhaps I’ll share some of the “(Almost) Favorite Photographs” in a separate post!)

I choose the final set from among all of the photographs that I shared on this website during 2025. The majority were also photographed during 2025, but a few are photographs “captured” earlier that I finished working on this year.

The final set includes diverse photographs since I photograph a wide range of subjects. Some of you who follow my landscape photography may not know that I also do travel and street photography, that I sometimes include people in my landscape work, or that I do some macro photography. So I select a set of favorites that includes examples from various genres. They also come from throughout the year and from many different places — the mountains, the desert, wildlife refuges, American and foreign travel, my local neighborhood.

Continue reading to see larger versions of the photographs and to read more about them. (Click photo titles below to see their original posts. Click on the photographs to view them larger.)

Birds, Rising Sun

It seems appropriate to start with a sunrise from California’s Central Valley, one of my favorite winter photography locations. I go there for the vast flocks of migratory birds, the long-distance views of the Sierra Nevada, and the mysterious and evocative tule fog. This photograph resulted from a combination of preparation and good luck. I was there plenty early for the beautiful sunrise, so I was ready to take advantage of this remarkable conjunction of light, color, atmosphere and birds in flight.

Marsh and Fog, Sunrise

This photograph comes from essentially the same location as the previous photo, but it reflects a completely different personality of the place. I made the photograph on a very still and quiet morning as fog slowly drifted over the wetlands just before sunrise. While photographing migratory birds here can include intense moments of excitement and action, often it is quiet and still and time almost seems to stop.

Sand Dune Abstract

There are many ways to “see” landscapes, from the literal to the abstract. I’m inclined to view them as shapes and textures and forms at least as much as I see them as specific places. Nowhere is this more true than with sand dunes. I’m not the first photographer to photograph these dunes in Death Valley National Park — though I do recall photographing them years ago before they became a “thing.” This time I photographed them in filtered soft light that allowed them to glow and take on warm colors. By using a long lens I managed to exclude anything that was not sand.

Wading Lake Manly

This was the year of Lake Manly n Death Valley National Park. It is an improbable lake that sometimes forms in the arid Badwater Basin during years of heavy (for Death Valley) rainfall. That happened twice this year. I first photographed the lake in early 2025 after a very big storm. But another big storm in November reincarnated the lake for a second time. I made this photograph just before Christmas. At first I resented the person who waded out into the shallow water and into my shots — but then I realized that she crystallized the scene.

Fog at Forest Edge

Funny story: Back in December I shared some contenders for the “Favorites” list with followers. A long-time friend and fellow backcountry traveler thought that I should exclude this one because it looks “like it was created by AI.” I can assure you it was not — it was simply an exceptionally beautiful moment in the Sierra high country. I camped a few minutes outside the eastern boundary of Yosemite, where it rained heavily the night before. I had a hunch that this might produce fog the next morning, so I headed into the park before sunrise. I soon came to this spot, a lake surrounded by meadow and forest, and there I found that fog. I stopped to wander the meadow and forest, photographing the fog as it drifted slowly above the meadow and among the trees.

Autumn Flow

I made this photograph on my annual visit to Yosemite Valley to photograph fall colors. To me, “fall color” goes beyond trees with autumn foliage to include all of the things that characterize this season in the Valley. Here this includes the lower and calmer river, the warm-toned reflections of trees and distant cliffs, and the cool color of the rocks. I lengthened the exposure so that the moving water blurred slightly and created an effect suggesting molten metal.

Shoreline Forest

This was an unusual year in the Yosemite high country along Tioga Pass Road. The Tuolumne Meadows campground remained closed for construction work, so there were no overnight visitors in the area — everyone had to drive in from a distance. Consequently the area was as quiet and lonely as I’ve ever experienced in the summer. I made this photograph in a place that would normally be crowded on this July 1 date, but I was virtually the only person there. I was captivated by the vertical forms of this grove of lakeside trees, here silhouetted against the luminous hazy atmosphere.

Sierra Stream, Aspen Color

I am almost embarrassed to admit that over two decades or more I probably drove past this scene in the Eastern Sierra scores of times without noticing it! This past season I finally walked to it from a nearby turn-out and saw what I had been missing — a lovely little stream flowing past aspen trees and other autumn foliage. (In truth, I’m glad that I continue to “discover” new things in familiar landscapes.)

Aspen Leaves, Morning Frost

The color of sunlight coming through autumn aspen trees is so compelling that it is easy to forget to look down. But after I finished photographing trees on a very cold October morning in the Eastern Sierra, I went for a short walk along the edge of a shady road near a lake. There I found piles of fallen aspen leaves in the morning shadows, mostly brown and edging toward black and covered with frost.

Creek Bed, Autumn Leaves

I publish most of my photographs shortly after I capture them — typically over the next month or two. But some have a much longer gestation period — like this one. The photograph comes from a 2012 (that is not a typo!) visit to Southern Utah with a small group of friends and photographers. This photograph languished in my raw file archives for over a decade, and it was only this year during one of my periodic reviews of old files that I came across it and wondered how in the world I had overlooked it a decade earlier.

Pink Tulip

This may seem like a somewhat atypical subject for me — a single flower, photographed at the Filoli estate’s garden in the San Francisco Bay Area. Indeed, this is not something I photograph all that often, but there’s an explanation. My wife, Patricia Emerson Mitchell, is an avid photographer of flowers and foliage. Sometimes I tag along when she photographs, just to see what I can do with these small subjects. On this morning there were hundreds of new tulip blossoms, so I focused on searching for the “perfect” flower.

Autumn Leaf Pile

Besides the fact that I like how it turned out, this photograph is in my “Favorites” collection as a representative of another aspect of my photography, “every day photography.” I walk a lot — commonly 4-6 miles every day. I always carry a camera, and I stop to photograph if I see something interesting. I was out on an autumn walk when I came across this pile of particularly colorful leaves just a few blocks from our home.

Rectangular

This photograph is also from one of my walks, though this time I was quite a bit further from home. I was passing through a stalled urban redevelopment project, where the party ostensibly spearheading the initiative decided to delay their work, leaving a very disturbed urban environment. Perhaps in an attempt to placate those worried about a developing eyesore, they painted many of the remaining buildings in wild colors and graphic patterns. In a sense this is an architectural photograph, but I prefer to view it as a sort of cubist abstract of rectangles and color.

Basilica de Nuestra Senora del Pilar

This photograph represents three threads in my work: architecture, night photography, and travel photography. We spent six weeks traveling in Germany, France, and Spain during late autumn and early winter of 2024. We always try to include a few places that are new to us, and more or less on a lark we decided to spend a few days in Zaragoza, Spain. It turned out to be one of the most charming places we visited. The photograph features the remarkable and monumental Basilica de Nuestra Senora del Pilar and its impressive spires, situated on the bank of the Ebro River.

Passing Cyclist, Le Marais

This photograph can be categorized as street photography or as travel photography. To be sure, much of my travel photography is street photography. Because we stayed in lodgings about a block from this spot and walked these streets years ago, I feel like I know this area. I decided to use the “pick a street landscape and wait for people to fill it” approach here. I framed the walls at the end of the street and photographed people as they passed by. You can never know for sure what you’ll see, but I got lucky when this woman wearing a red coat and riding a blue bicycle quickly passed by.

Grapevine and Door, Provesende

(You can find a list of links to “Favorites” from previous years in the left sidebar.)

Last spring we traveled in Portugal, Spain, and Belgium for about a month and a half. A highlight of this trip was a weeklong walk in Portugal’s Douro Valley, a region of vineyards, villages, and rustic beauty. On the first day we climbed steep paths from Pinhão up to the village of Provesende, where we came across this old building as we arrived at the outskirts of the village. I was intrigued by the patina of old, worn surfaces and by the solitary grape vine growing from a crack in the wall, all of which somehow encapsulated the feeling of this region.

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G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him. Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email

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