2025: New Year, New Ambitions
A bit late to the party, but hey - better late than never, as they say.
2024 was quite a year for me. While I officially started this website back in 2023, the majority of the pages, the storefront and galleries were created as 2024 progressed, and with those pages came the thing this website was created for - my photos. To date, I now have 172 of them available as prints in various sizes and formats, with these being the five most popular as of now:
Looking back through all of the photos I’ve published, I’m certainly proud of what I’ve accomplished and how my skills as a photographer and editor have drastically improved since starting just over a year ago.
…But I’d be lying if I said I was completely satisfied with how my work has turned out.
Don’t get me wrong - I try to the best of my personal ability to put forth my absolute best work whenever I publish something new here, blog posts included. However, whenever I view photos from well-established photographers on Instagram or YouTube (as part of some tutorial I’m watching for Lightroom or Photoshop), I can’t help but think to myself: “Why aren’t MY photos turning out as awesome/impactful/dramatic/(insert superlative) as that?” I always end up reevaluating my entire workflow as a result, rethinking everything from the mechanics of how I set up and take a shot to the minute intricacies of my Lightroom/Photoshop editing processes. Heck, I became so caught up in that whole line of thinking that I purchased a pair of books on taking, editing and selling photos that I read during my recent European excursion - literally as I was taking photos for the new European gallery. They certainly helped, and I can’t help but notice a noteworthy trend in how my photography style shifted as the trip continued after reading those books.
Going into 2025 with the lessons I learned from those books and my European excursion in mind, and with a seemingly insatiable appetite for creating photographs that are more than mere snapshots, I’d like to share my 2025 Photography Resolutions here, in no particular order:
Plan for More Time
Ah, time. That thing we never have enough of these days.
Rushing to snap a photo or three of something that caught my eye before chasing after the rest of my family or sprinting back to the cruise ship became a recurring theme for the entirety of my European trip - and, frankly, it showed in many of the photos that I brought back. For example, take this work-in-progress panorama of a town from Italy near San Gimignano:
Panorama of a town in the Italian countryside near San Gimignano.
Aside from AI denoising and stitching the photos together to make this panorama, this image is straight out of my camera. The backstory behind it is we were driving on our way to see the famed leaning tower of Pisa after visiting San Gimignano when we saw this picturesque town right off the side of the road. Thanks to an early deadline to re-embark on the cruise ship and at least an hour’s drive to the terminal from where we were, time was already tight, so we only had a few moments to pull over, step out of the car and snap a few quick shots before hurriedly moving onward.
Unfortunately, as you can see quite plainly, the lighting situation on the entire scene was suboptimal when I took the photo. Aside from the bright white clouds and very dark shadows, the majority of the image is particularly flat tonally. I’ve posted the panorama’s histogram here, which clearly indicates with mocking bimodal peaks that the panorama is rich in shadows and highlights with virtually no midtones. As I’ve found out the hard way recently, that tone distribution is very difficult to work with. As of this post, I’m up to five attempts on editing the panorama… and will probably be on attempt six soon.
Now, if I had more time available to me when I took the shots for this panorama, I might have opted to wait a few minutes for the lighting to change. While it was a cloudy day, there were frequent breaks in the cloud cover that could have allowed some sunlight to illuminate the town more than the surrounding countryside, thus allowing it to become a natural focal point for our eyes in the overall scene. This is something I’m trying to recreate through clever masking in Lightroom, but I haven’t been able to achieve a convincing edit of that yet.
That’s just one thing I could have improved if I had more time. Under the same circumstances in the alternate timeline above, I might have also deployed my tripod and went for several long exposures to induce a softer, dreamier look for the image. I might have also considered setting up a few bracketed exposures to help with dynamic range while doing that, as well. The point here is that for a photo to turn out the best it can be, the process of planning and capturing the shot shouldn’t really be rushed. Under the right circumstances, it can be - I’m thinking primarily wildlife, sports, events, or something along those lines where spontaneity is the rule more than careful composition - but for what I envision for my landscape shots, I need to budget more time for the whole process of taking a photo and to force myself to consider multiple approaches for the scene before hitting that shutter button.
More time may honestly be all the difference between taking a breathtaking photo and multiple agonizing days struggling to make one breathtaking.
Master Lightroom and Photoshop
Of course, the two scenarios aren’t mutually exclusive. A breathtaking photo will still need plenty of editing in Lightroom and Photoshop to truly reach its maximum “wow” potential.
Up until about a year or two ago, I had no idea about even the basic workflows of photo editing. At the time, I used two free and open-source alternatives to Adobe’s flagship products, Darktable and GIMP. For a lack of a better description, I eyeballed my edits: if it looked good to me, it shipped. When I finally made the switch over to Lightroom and began researching proper photo editing techniques, I was blown away by the sudden jump in quality in my photos. As an example, compare my Carribean gallery with my Hawaii gallery; I edited the former with Darktable (with the exception of the Trafalgar waterfall photo - I redid that one later), and the latter with Lightroom. There’s a clear difference in the richness of the colors and tones between the two galleries, and with the overall image clarity - both heavily favoring the Lightroom’d Hawaii gallery.
The main problem with switching editing software was that I now had to relearn how to do everything and more in Lightroom and Photoshop, which has become an ongoing process. I struggled at first, particularly when I needed to remove distracting elements from a photo, but eventually I powered through the learning curve with a hefty stack of YouTube tutorials.
Nowadays, I’m relatively comfortable with each program’s UI and I can radically transform photos with their tools. I’d like to continue expanding my photo editing skills in 2025 so that I become proficient enough with Lightroom and Photoshop that I won’t need to consult a YouTube video every five minutes for help. Essentially, I want using Lightroom and Photoshop to become as natural as riding a bike.
That’ll probably - and somewhat ironically - entail studying more YouTube tutorials, but I’m considering finding a decent online class for them somewhere and see where that takes me. In the meantime, I’m going to go back to figuring out how that tone curve module works…
Be Bold and Experiment More
Figuring out Lightroom and Photoshop will be easy enough with the right reference materials on hand, but this particular goal will probably be the hardest for me personally to achieve.
While reviewing the photos I took from 2024, I noticed a common theme: I generally avoided complicated or abstract compositions as well as overly bombastic, gaudy edits. Instead, I opted to keep it simple and safe: I see something interesting, I frame it using the Rule of Thirds, take the photo, boost its contrast/color/clarity, retouch it, done. Very clean, very repeatable, very predictable, and very… mundane.
I discovered that the problem with this methodical approach is photographic creativity doesn’t flourish with a strict formulaic routine: like all visual media, photography is an art, a form of expression, experimentation, and subjectivity - something more than pushing the Saturation slider to 75 for every image. (Yeah, we all had that phase at one point…)
That freeform creativity and willingness to experiment is something I generally struggle with, and for me, it’s not unlike staring at a blank page for hours while figuring out how to write an essay… or a blog post. Frankly, I can attribute much of that missing “wow” factor in my photography to this reluctance to break free from my comfort zone, although there were a few exceptions where I tried breaking the mold a little. Noteworthy examples of my attempts at experimentation are on display in the mini gallery in this section. With one exception, these photos aren’t included in any of my actual galleries, either due to some technical problems with the image during editing or there simply not being enough similar images to form a separate gallery. Let me know what you think of them in the comments section; if there’s enough interest in these unreleased photos, I might create a dedicated gallery for my more ambitious projects.
With that in mind, I’m aiming for 2025 to become the year where I experiment with how I approach photography, and in particular, I want to develop my own unique style - one that is readily recognizable to where viewers know just by looking that a photo is unmistakably mine, in a good way.
Here’s to 2025!
2024 was a remarkable year in which I made great strides in learning the fundamentals of photography; now, as we step into 2025, I am excited to take that knowledge and transform it into incredible works of art. Here’s to a very photogenic 2025!
Got your own photography goals? Share them down in the comments below!
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