My portraits didn’t do well this year, but a few landscapes did okay!
This one scored the highest at 85. It’s the view of Mt Hood from Larch Mountain. I joined some others to photograph the moonrise over the mountain. Full disclosure–all my photos of that were terrible. I couldn’t get the focus or exposure right! But this soft dusky sky and pink mountain are so calming and lovely.
This is my favorite image that I entered from 2024. It’s from the outing to Stonehenge during the SuperMoon in October 2024. That huge bright thing is the full moon, not the sun! Sadly, it did not merit. The judges didn’t like the angle I used, and there were some blurry cloud blobs that they thought were artifacts from bad editing. Oh well.
For the record, here’s the original, unedited image–I straightened it out and adjusted exposure/shadows/highlights to brighten the whole thing, and reduced noise, and that’s it.
This is my favorite image that I entered in 2025, and it barely merited (80 after a challenge). I took it late in 2024. I was at the edge of the beach and took a bunch of photos that felt boring and lackluster. Then I realized I could try to frame Haystack Rock in between the dune grasses. I was very pleased and proud how it came out! Hilariously, some of the judges didn’t like that there was so much foreground and so much out of focus. That was the entire point of this composition. 🙂
The rest of these got 80s.
I called this one “Cross Section” and it’s from the tulip festival, of course.
This is one of my favorite views – the sunrise from my dad’s house looking across the valley to the foothills. I take so many pictures of this view. 🙂 My favorite is when the mist is even higher and it looks like we’re floating on a cloud.
Foggy, colorful day at Hoyt Arboretum last fall.
Playing with ICM on a photo walk in my neighborhood last fall.
And here are the ones that didn’t merit:
