I’ve gathered some of the photos I liked most throughout the year,1 starting with this shot of redwood sorrel in Humboldt County, California. It lacks a clear focal point and/or subject, but it’s one of my favorites anyway.
As soon as I chose it, I realized that my favorites aren’t necessarily great photographs. Some are faves simply because of the memories I associate with them, and others because of the feelings they evoke. In this case, the redwood sorrel reminds me of the coast redwood forests, which are the most magical I’ve ever encountered.
Similarly, the photo of the buck in velvet below reminds me of the summer day I was walking through my favorite Sandia meadow. I caught a quick glimpse, out of the corner of my eye, of some tree branches I didn’t remember ever seeing before. Of course I hadn’t seen them; they were actually deer antlers.
My “deer friend” was joined in the meadow by two smaller bucks, and the three of them allowed me to take photos for nearly five minutes.2 The post in which this image originally appeared has a total of six deer images. I love all of them.
The meadow where I saw the deer essentially continues north across the highway to the area below, where I took a photo of an approaching summer storm. This is one of my very favorite views in the Sandias. As winter continues, and I start to long for summer in the high mountains, this will be one of the first areas I’ll imagine.
The day I got shots of the Northern Flicker eating Russian olives was another high point, mostly because the flicker actually stayed there long enough for me to take multiple photos. I really don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that at least 95% of my flicker sightings come as they’re flying away from me. There are two more flicker images in the original post.
A Milbert’s tortoiseshell!!! I can go several years at a time without running into one of these butterflies but this year, for the first time ever, I actually saw two of them (the first appeared here). The post in which I originally shared this particular photo shows three other types of butterflies as well.
I like all the images in the post where the photo below originally appeared, but this is probably my favorite. The contrast between the purple aster in the foreground and the fetid goosefoot in the background, in terms of both color and focus, is especially beautiful to my eye.3
No retrospective would be complete without a photo of a rock garden, even if this one is limited to a single flower. It was difficult to choose just one photo from the original post because I like them all so much. In addition to this wild geranium, the images include penstemon, coralbells, and death camas, not to mention other colorful lichens.
Finally, here’s a photographic reminder of how 2022’s everyday magic began, with gorgeous light over the Sandia mountains at sunset on New Year’s Day. I was reminded very recently of what I wrote in the first post of 2022, that what I expect to see so often blinds me to what is actually there.4
As 2022 draws to a close, I want to thank you all again for following my work and for all your likes, comments, and direct emails. It would be easy to feel I was sending these missives into a vacuum. You’ve ensured that I never feel that — thank you, thank you!
I wish you and yours a happy, healthy, and creative new year, filled with many experiences of everyday magic.
Last year’s retrospective focused on what I imagined you all liked most. This year, you can instead peruse the posts Substack thought were best liked. One caveat is that they include some posts from 2021 as well.
The captions on each photo link to the posts in which they originally appeared.
An additional note about that first-day-of-fall post: It includes a photo from the New Mexico State Fair at the very end. I continue to be amused by how clearly the two comments on the post express directly opposite opinions about the State Fair.
I spent much of this month working on a photographic project that may never see the light of day, tracking the sun as we neared the winter solstice. It was only after the solstice that I realized I’d consistently focused only on what I expected to see rather than what was there. It’s a continual learning process (sigh).
❤️❤️❤️
Happy New Year!
Happy New Year from Illinois! Please keep sending your shots in 2023.
Margo