2023: one for every month
This might be the last post for a little while (see the previous post) and is simply a little bit of year end tidying up picking out one image from each month in 2023. Some have been the subject of the monthly reviews, some haven’t and some have been tweaked. These aren’t necessarily the best twelve images of 2023, but they are ones I enjoyed making over the course of the year…
January - Ornsay Lighthouse, Eilean Sionnach
An early highlight was January’s trip to Sky, which I described here. The experience of spending a few days confined to a very small island was an interesting exercise in exploring a scene and composition. It also yielded probably my best image of the year and, rightly, it has pride of place in this review.
The other main contender for my favourite image of the year was taken in the last month of the year. I’ve seen this location at Inveruglas a few times and driven past it frequently over the years, never having the time or the conditions to stop. I finally managed it last month and I’m very pleased that I did.
The final image in the ‘top three’ is a shot from October when we travelled up to Glen Affric for a few days. I’ve written about that trip here, but the short version is that we were extremely lucky with the weather on the Monday when we ventured into Glen Strathfarrar. The combination of fog, a heavy frost and bright sunlight created a magical look that I’ve almost certainly failed to capture. I enjoyed trying though, and it was probably one of my favourite days of the year.
The remaining images are, in chronological order, in the gallery below. There are a couple of honourable mentions: the aurora shot from Lewis didn’t make the cut, losing out to a shot from the east coast. A shot from the same trip did make March, however, and you can read about that trip here. Having used an image from the Canada and Alaska trip in April, I opted for an infrared shot in May, reflecting another technique I’m determined to pursue further in 2024.
And finally, over 2023 I started to put together small panels of images and triptychs, which I quite enjoyed. The most ambitious of these was the final output of my monopoly project, which was years in the making and days in the execution. The final output is below and you can read about the whole project here.
