My Favorites from 2011

2011 is over and as I look back I can say it was a great year. On the most part 2011 was pretty normal when it came to my photography. That is except for two main things, one being part of this post and another will be in text only.

First every year is a football year and most of the pictures I take each year are of football, which makes picking my favorites even harder. As I looked through all of my shots this year the first two stood out the most for me and to be honest they aren't the most visual when it comes to action, but visually I loved them.

Let's go over this first shot. By itself it lacks action completely and looks like it was a posed shot, but in fact it was taken during a game as the opposing team's quarterback was dropping back while avoiding a tackle and looked in my direction for a receiver. When I first saw the shot I didn't think much of it, but once I converted it to this high contrast b&w shot is just stood out and became one of my favorites for the year in football.

That brings us to this second shot, which most people have seen in b&w like the above shot. Initially I don't see the elements I would like to see in my action shots (faces / limbs cut off), but after I looked at this shot for a bit I fell in love with it. I find myself asking who would win this tug-of-war, although I do know who won, but if I'm asking this then my viewer would be asking it as well and I liked that part of the shot.

I do a lot with high school track and think I do a great job capturing the action. It was hard finding it hard to find my favorites in track as I had a bunch to go through and unlike football, most of my track shots are taken at peak action. But the below 4 shots stood out above the rest.

I'm known for my sports photography, but something else that's close to my heart is wildlife photography. I find it very soothing and relaxing to get out in the morning or evening hours to hike and shoot wildlife. These are my favorites for the year.

Ok, how can you not love this below shot, I mean really, it has the awww factor.

The below b&w shot has to be my favorite of them all. I have a 18x24 matted print of this hanging up in my office - Love it.

This brings me to the last group of shots. Last year I had the honor to attend my first and last Mpix Meet-up, which I also had the honor to teach a sports action photography class, but nothing here is about that class. Instead I want to share two portraits I took during a class I attended by Jennifer Walsh who covered avalible light.

This young lady had beautiful eyes and this shot really shows that. I loved the closeness of this shot.

As for this next one, this beautiful young lady was one of the Meet-up attendees daughter who volunteered to model. I simply loved her smile which just brighten everything up.

The last two were taken while on Route 66 with a Mpix buddy of mine (Paige). This is something really out of my box as I don't do a lot (if any) of this type of shooting, but I loved how these came out so they made my all-time favorites.