Tag Archives: favorites

Annual Favorites, Commentary, Site News

2012 Favorite Photographs – Final Candidates Gallery

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These are my current forty (!) final candidates for my “2012 Favorite Photographs” post that I hope to share later this week. This is still way too many, and my target is to try to get the number down to about half of this. I’m happy to hear your feedback in whatever form works best for you: identifying one or a few favorites, suggesting your “top X number” of them from within the group, your favorites of each of the various types, or even suggestions of photographs of mine that are not included in this list.

If you didn’t already know, this is a tough job!

Some of my criteria for the final selection include:

  • representing a range of genres – landscape (both large and small), night photography, wildlife, urban landscape, nature, and so forth.
  • incorporating both color and monochrome work.
  • balancing representational work with photographs that are a bit more conceptual, atmospheric, and so forth.
  • recognizing work that others tell me they like.
  • sharing photographs that are personal favorite of mine.

The gallery thumbnails show below are small and may omit portions of images, so click on an image to see a larger version. Once you click on that first image you can use the right/left arrows to navigate through the larger versions of the photographs throughout the entire gallery.

Thanks for looking and for whatever feedback you are willing to share. (Leaving a comment below is a great way to do this.)

Dan

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Community, Ideas, Photographers

Help Michael Frye Decide – His “Best of 2010” Photographs

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Michael Frye has borrowed – with my blessings! – my idea of asking readers, photographers, and photography fans to help with the process of determining which photographs should end up in his “Best of 2010” list.

I did something similar when coming up with my 2010 Favorites list – I asked readers to give me their feedback on which of my photographs spoke to them, and I used that feedback to edit the list down a bit and then to determine the order in which the photos would be posted. Michael has set a more difficult task for his readers. Out of his large selection of very wonderful photographs – at least a couple of which have “iconic” potential – he wants to end up with a list of his best 10.

Wander on over there and take a look at his wonderful collection of photographs – and good luck trying to limit yourself to only 10! I took a look earlier today, realized it was going to be too difficult to eliminate that many in order to come up with a small list, and decided to come back later. While you are visiting his site, be sure to poke around a bit. There is a lot of other great stuff there. In addition to his photography, I recommend looking at his reviews of readers’ photographs and at his “how to” videos.

While I have your attention, I want to echo one thing that Michael wrote in his post: “… the judge—me—gets a say too, so if one of my favorites gets panned by everyone else I may still include it. But as one of my photographer friends, Clinton Smith, once said, we don’t get to pick our best images—the world does. So your votes will carry a lot of weight.”

Like Michael, I did “get the final say,” but I strongly agree that we are often the least able to judge the potential success of our photographs. Sometimes I know that a photograph will communicate with others, but very often (more often, perhaps?) I am surprised by the positive feedback I get on a photograph that wasn’t necessarily one of my very favorites and by the fact that my favorites are often not the ones that speak to others. I had to swallow hard and remove a couple from my initial “favorites” list when they didn’t get much response – but I am always very interested to see what the reactions are, and I learned a lot by considering your votes and reading your comments. (My own personal favorite among my photographs was not selected as the “readers’ favorite,” but I was relieved to see that it at least did pretty well! :-)