For various reasons it took me a long time to commit to a set of favorite photographs of 2024. I chose the title of this list carefully, as I do every year. Note that it is not “Best Photgraphs” or “My 15 Favorite Photographs” or similar — it is just Favorite Photographs of 2024. Why is that? These are, indeed, among my “favorite” photograph from 2024, but I can’t say for sure that they are the favorite, much less that they are my “best” of the year.

Making this annual list is both a pleasure and a big challenge. The pleasure comes from reviewing hundreds of photographs and, in the process, both rediscovering some of them and reliving the experiences behind making them. The challenge? There are several. The first is that it is very hard to winnow them down to a manageable number. I probably stared with nearly 100, made a quick cut to half that many, labored to make the next 50% cut, and finally got the number down to the 15 you see here. (My target was a dozen, but now that I’m eight months late… it was time to just put them out there!)

The photographs include several themes in my photography: The Sierra Nevada, travel and street photography, the desert and ocean, wildlife and nature. To qualify as a “2024 Favorite” the photographs had to have first been publicly shared in that year. First up is a display of the whole set, followed further down that page with larger individual files with a bit more information. (Clicking on the larger photographs opens their original posts in new tabs.)

View larger versions of the individual photographs below. Click on any of them to visit the original posts, which include additional background information.